Personalization of information access for electronic catalogs on the web

Abstract

To attract and keep people at a web site is one of the major challenges in electronic commerce. More advertising, providing more useful information, or designing more flashy pages cannot prevent the Internet surfers from getting lost in the huge amount of information, especially the electronic catalogues. One solution is to customize the website for each for individual user through the analysis of preferences and interests in the user profile. The site should be able to customize itself on information content, information organization and information display. Information collection, analysis, and customization form a process to improve and customize the web site for each user, without Webmaster interference in normal operation. In this paper, a Personalized Electronic Catalogue (PEC) System is proposed to synthesize the customization of information content, organization, and display for electronic catalogs. An industrial application is used to demonstrate the improvement of information access for electronic catalogs. © Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.