A hierarchical constraint satisfaction approach to product selection for electronic shopping support

The development of advanced information and telecommunications technologies has established more convenient ways of interorganizational business transactions. Especially, various forms of electronic trading systems are introduced, which replicate, and often improve, functions of physical market places. We propose a product selection mechanism for such an electronic marketplace, which is viewed as a satisfaction problem of hierarchically organized constraints over product attributes. The proposed approach is more expressively powerful and flexible than product selection based on a single product taxonomy hierarchy.