WISECON: the intelligent support for e-commerce

Internet shopping using some on-line catalogue of products is one of the fastest growing businesses now. An intelligent support for selecting a product should work as an on-request-assistant not forcing the user to perform any unnecessary steps. As many Internet portals which support browsing and search, the proposed solution should support browsing the catalogue. Our paper describes some ongoing work on an intelligent shopping assistant of a hardware vendor who sells a relatively restricted scale of products (PCs) manufactured by a single company. We propose a solution that will make browsing the catalogue easier, will recommend products, and will adapt its behavior to different types of users. Grouping the products into easily interpretable clusters can enhance browsing. To recommend a product and to adapt the system to different users, we propose to use a possibilistic network. We believe that our solution will be able to automatically follow the changes in the notions of computer characteristics (as the performance of new products increases), will be able to easily incorporate new products and will be able to understand requests from different types of users.