Building Adaptive E-Catalog Communities Based on User Interaction Patterns

online, such as at www.dell.com or Amazon.com. Most solutions to the problem of organizing and integrating e-catalogs use a category-based hierarchy to structure a product catalog in a “one view fits all” fashion. This hierarchy is often determined by a system designer, who usually has a priori expectations of how customers will explore catalogs. However, customers might have different expectations. To minimize the gap between these expectations, designers should consider how customers actually use the catalogs. For example, for a computer parts catalog, assume that many users always access the product category RAM right after the category CPU. If the administrator merges the two categories to form a new category CPU&RAM, users need to visit the new category only once for information on both products. We propose a user-centric technique for restructuring integrated e-catalogs. We’ve implemented this technique in WebCatalogPers,1 a system that integrates online product catalogs. WebCatalogPers aims to continuously improve the organization of catalogs by responding to the ways customers navigate them. The resulting integrated catalogs continuously adapt and can be restructured in a dynamic environment.