Serendipitous Exploration of Large-scale Product Catalogs

Abstract-Online shopping has developed to a stage where catalogs have become very large and diverse. Thus, it is a challenge to present relevant items to potential customers within a very few interactions. This is even more so when users have no defined shopping objectives but operate in an opportunistic mindset. This problem is often tackled by recommender systems. However, these systems rely on consistent user interaction patterns to predict items of interest. In contrast, we propose to adapt the classical information retrieval (IR) paradigm for the purpose of accessing catalog items in a context of un-predictable user interaction. Accordingly, we present a novel information access strategy based on the notion of interest rather than relevance. We detail the design of a scalable browsing system including learning capabilities joint with a limited-memory model. Our approach enables locating interesting items within a few steps while not requiring good quality descriptions. Our system allows customer to seamlessly change browsing objectives without having to start explicitly a new session. An evaluation of our approach based on both artificial and real-life datasets demonstrates its efficiency in learning and adaptation. I. MOTIVATION The emergence of online shopping has offered new opportunities to propose services and products to customers. Currently, many online shops are not anymore restricted to a certain category of products. For example Amazon, initially focused on cultural and entertainment media (books, music, and video), is now offering products as diverse as home appliances or jewelry. Even more crucial, we usually find thousands of items within a product category, e.g. 38 million books and 3,5 million jewelry items on Amazon. Both the breadth of product lines and the depth within a product line not only boost the volume of the catalogs but also make it difficult for the customer to find products of interest without an accurate search protocol. Presenting relevant products to potential customers is the goal of recommender systems. Independent of their type (collaborative filtering systems, content-based recommender, etc), recommender systems usually operate on a user profile gained from previous shopping sessions. For this reason, recommender systems suffer from the cold-start problem, when new users and/or new products appear In contrast to the above, our approach does not require the definition of a user profile nor it imposes specific search sessions with pre-defined objectives. In other words, we present an efficient product access strategy enabling intuitive browsing by estimating the user's intention from his/her input to the system and displaying items that are considered as most interesting to him/her (and thus likely to be purchased). Our new information access strategy is based on the notion of current interest rather than on the notion of relevance classically used in Information Retrieval (O1) We accommodate serendipity. We assume no pre-defined (fixed) objective of the user's chain of actions; (O2) The system matches classic (simple) interaction models; (O3) The system is scalable in terms of the volume of the product catalog. Our approach results in an interactive navigation system, which let the user operate naturally over the product catalog while swiftly reacting to changes in the browsing objectives. The major difference with earlier approaches is a rapidly adapting system, that copes with radical changes, and is scalable to operate over realistic-scale product catalogs. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: in section II, we discuss relevant approaches for information characterisation and content access strategies in large repositories. In section III, we present our interaction model, which describes the type of interaction that is expected from the user and what information is carried over with this interaction. We formalise our navigation model, anticipating functional issues in section IV. In particular, we review its properties ensuring scalability and compatibility with other models. In section V, we propose a comprehensive assessment of the performance of our model in an adaptive browsing scenario. At every browsing step, the system aims at displaying the most useful items to the user with respect to past interaction. Although our study includes an inherent temporal dimension, which makes the evaluation context different from that of classical searc

Current and Future Issues in BPM Research: A European Perspective from the ERCIS Meeting 2010

Business process management (BPM) is a still-emerging field in the academic discipline of Information Systems (IS). This article reflects on a workshop on current and future issues in BPM research that was conducted by seventeen IS researchers from eight European countries as part of the 2010 annual meeting of the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). The results of this workshop suggest that BPM research can meaningfully contribute to investigating a broad variety of phenomena that are of interest to IS scholars, ranging from rather technical (e.g., the implementation of software architectures) to managerial (e.g., the impact of organizational culture on process performance). It further becomes noticeable that BPM researchers can make use of several research strategies, including qualitative, quantitative, and design-oriented approaches. The article offers the participants’ outlook on the future of BPM research and combines their opinions with research results from the academic literature on BPM, with the goal of contributing to establishing BPM as a distinct field of research in the IS discipline

Historical biogeography of the leopard (Panthera pardus) and its extinct Eurasian populations

Background: Resolving the historical biogeography of the leopard (Panthera pardus) is a complex issue, because patterns inferred from fossils and from molecular data lack congruence. Fossil evidence supports an African origin, and suggests that leopards were already present in Eurasia during the Early Pleistocene. Analysis of DNA sequences however, suggests a more recent, Middle Pleistocene shared ancestry of Asian and African leopards. These contrasting patterns led researchers to propose a two-stage hypothesis of leopard dispersal out of Africa: an initial Early Pleistocene colonisation of Asia and a subsequent replacement by a second colonisation wave during the Middle Pleistocene. The status of Late Pleistocene European leopards within this scenario is unclear: were these populations remnants of the first dispersal, or do the last surviving European leopards share more recent ancestry with their African counterparts? Results: In this study, we generate and analyse mitogenome sequences from historical samples that span the entire modern leopard distribution, as well as from Late Pleistocene remains. We find a deep bifurcation between African and Eurasian mitochondrial lineages (~ 710 Ka), with the European ancient samples as sister to all Asian lineages (~ 483 Ka). The modern and historical mainland Asian lineages share a relatively recent common ancestor (~ 122 Ka), and we find one Javan sample nested within these. Conclusions: The phylogenetic placement of the ancient European leopard as sister group to Asian leopards suggests that these populations originate from the same out-of-Africa dispersal which founded the Asian lineages. The coalescence time found for the mitochondrial lineages aligns well with the earliest undisputed fossils in Eurasia, and thus encourages a re-evaluation of the identification of the much older putative leopard fossils from the region. The relatively recent ancestry of all mainland Asian leopard lineages suggests that these populations underwent a severe population bottleneck during the Pleistocene. Finally, although only based on a single sample, the unexpected phylogenetic placement of the Javan leopard could be interpreted as evidence for exchange of mitochondrial lineages between Java and mainland Asia, calling for further investigation into the evolutionary history of this subspecies

Transforming UMM Business Collaboration Models to BPEL

Abstract: UN/CEFACT´s Modeling Methodology (UMM) has been developed to analyze and design B2B business processes independent of the underlying exchange technology. It became the methodology of choice for developing ebXML business processes. Another technology for realizing B2B partnerships is Web Services. Currently, the business process execution languages (BPEL) seem to be the winner amongst the Web Services languages for orchestration and choreography. If Web Services is used as underlying exchange technology for B2B, the semantics of UMM business processes must be represented in BPEL. The goal of this paper is to verify whether BPEL is appropriate to capture UMM business collaborations or not. For this purpose we describe a transformation from UMM to BPEL

From multi-context Business Collaboration Models to context-specific ebXML BPSS

Prior to conducting business by means of ebXML, business partners agree on the business processes they are able to support. The choreography of these business processes is described as an instance of the ebXML business process specification schema (BPSS). For execution purposes the BPSS must be defined in the exact business context of the partnership. Reference models for B2B processes developed by standard organizations usually span over multiple business contexts to avoid a multitude of "similar" processes

Choreography of ebXML business collaborations

The ebXML framework consists of eight loosely coupled specifications for conducting e-Business. The choreography of ebXML business processes is defined by instances of the business process specification schema (BPSS). The BPSS is defined as an XML schema. It specifies elements describing the inter-organizational business processes, called business collaborations, but does not concentrate on intraorganizational business processes. Most of the underlying semantics were derived from the meta model of the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM). In this paper we describe the characteristics of ebXML business collaborations. We demonstrate how these concepts are captured by UMM and BPSS. These concepts must be supported by any proposed alternative business process interchange format in order to bridge between ebXML and other approaches, or even to replace BPSS

Registering a Business Collaboration Model in Multiple Business Environments

Today business registries are regarded as means of finding services offered by a business partner. However, business registries might also serve as means of seaching inter-organizational business process definitions that are relevant in one’s own business environment. Thus, it is important to define in which environments an inter-organizational business process definition is valid. Furthermore, environment-specific adaptations of the business process definition might be registered. In this paper the business process definitions are based on UMM business collaboration models. We discuss two approaches: Firstly, the binding of a model to business environments is specified within the model itself. Secondly, the binding of a model to business environments is defined in the registry meta-data

A model-driven top-down approach to interorganizational systems: From global choreography models to executable BPEL

Abstract Today, most approaches for inter-organizational business processes start bottom-up from the interfaces and the workflows of each partner described on the IT layer. Alternatively, one may start from the commitments and agreements between business partners to reach their complementary business goals. The latter approach is target of the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM), which models a global choreography. In a model driven approach the UMM artifacts must be further elaborated towards an IT solution for each participating business partner. For this purpose we have developed a UML profile to model a local choreography or an orchestration that respects the agreements made in the global choreography. In order to execute the local choreography / orchestration in the local IT, the processes must be machine-readable. For this purpose we demonstrate a transformation to the business process execution language (WS-BPEL)

B2B Integration - Aligning ebXML and Ontology Approaches

In B2B e-commerce, XML provides means to exchange data between applications