A consumer decision support system for Internet shopping

The web-shopping activity is considered with the aim of improving the quality of the information available to consumers for making their purchasing decisions. A technique called product space map is proposed, which allows a qualitative description of the main features of the considered products. By applying this technique, the products in a considered product line (for example televisions) are first clustered into price categories such as low end, moderate and high end. For each category a set of linguistic summaries outlining the properties shared by the contained products is defined. An example of a linguistic summary is "Most TV's in the high price category provide extremely high resolution".