Knowledge-Based Sales Advisory: Experiences and Future Directions

This paper summarizes our experiences gained from several industrial advisory applications that were developed with the knowledge-based ADVISOR SUITE framework over the last years and gives an outlook on future extensions of the presented system. In the ‘experiences’ section of the paper, we first address aspects related to the development of such applications, such as knowledge engineering, software maintenance, or testing. In addition, we describe the main requirements for such an advisory application to be perceived as an intelligent, value-adding service by the end users and finally summarize the results of an industrial study on how advisory applications are able to influence the buying behavior of online shoppers. The second part of the paper discusses current and future extensions of our system. The main lines of research addressed in this section are ‘Extended debugging support’, ‘Automated extraction of product data from web sources’, ‘Log mining and advanced data analysis’, and ‘Community-adapted advisory systems’.