A conceptual model of an intelligent catalog search system

In this article, we review the role of electronic catalogs in developing electronic commerce applications within the context of consumer buying behavior models. These models view the customer buying experience as a stagewise process, starting with need identification and proceeding through product and merchant brokering to negotiation, purchase, and service. Electronic product catalogs can be used in all of the just mentioned stages; however, their most common use is in the product and merchant brokering stages. From a customer's perspective, however, the variety and heterogeneity of electronic catalogs create a major problem in integrating information from various sources. There have been several attempts to overcome this problem using architectures and protocols that enable interoperabilty of electronic catalogs using software-agent technology. The extant architectures and protocols emphasize semantic integration of different catalogs as a mean for achieving interoperability. In this article, we expand previous work on this topic and propose a comprehensive agent-based conceptual model of an intelligent catalog search system (ICSS) [1]. The ICSS incorporates knowledge to analyze, enhance, filter, and synthesize a raw query and replies provided by various types of electronic catalogs and intercatalog brokering systems. The main benefit of the proposed architecture is an increase in the ability of a customer to locate, compare, and evaluate relevant product offerings in a network of heterogeneous electronic product catalogs.