A model for product / catalog integration: data processes design and prototype implementation

Abstract

The availability of a large number of users and the possibility of a worldwide market via internet have led to most of retailers, supermarkets, book stores etc. to offer their product lines over the internet. This circumstance has resulted in a rapid growth of electronic commerce. The fact that there are hundreds of on-line suppliers that offer the same products with different descriptions and prices propitiates a new kind of web applications under the pseudonym "Comparators". The main advantage of this kind of applications is that they allow users (i) to access the complete information of a product available on different electronic commerce catalogs, and (ii) to save the effort of browsing those different websites. The challenge of developing this type of applications is to integrate into a single catalog the same products available on different electronic commerce catalogs with different descriptions and taxonomies. Therefore, it is necessary to follow some tasks that will try to overcome the data heterogeneity that appears among the different supplier catalogs