Customizing Buyer's Directory from Multiple Sellers' e-Catalogs

Abstract

A multitude of seller-centric e-marketplaces in the B2B EC environment are not organized from the buying organizations point of view. Thus the buying organization needs to customize a buyer-centric directory from the external e-catalogs. This is particularly important in desk-top purchasing systems that requires the internalized e-catalog. Recently the one-to-one e-catalog approach is attempted to allow the buyer to select a subset of a sellers directory. Although this is a helpful screening capability, there are still several problems to be resolved such as the mismatched level of details, directory depths unbalance, and changed category names. In addition, the integration with multiple sellers e-catalogs and maintaining consistency with the dynamically changing sellers e-catalogs should be supported. To overcome these problems, we adopt the logic programming approach because it can represent the structures of both buyers and sellers directories. Predicates as directory definition language can effectively represent the buyers extraction of relevant parts from sellers directories. The crudely selected directory can be modified using five directory modification rules. To control the application of these rules, we devised a top down control algorithm. The algorithm could improve the depth and balance of directory significantly, so it can be automatically generate more effective buyers directory.