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Alice: Assisting Online Shoppers through Ontologies and Novel Interface Metaphors

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Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: Ontologies and the Semantic Web (EKAW 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2473))

Abstract

In this paper we describe some results of the Alice project. Alice is an ontology based e-commerce project which aims to support online users in the task of shopping. Ontologies describing customers, products, typical shopping tasks and the external context form the basis for the Alice architecture. We also exploit two novel interface metaphors originally developed for navigating databases: the Guides metaphor and Dynamic Queries. The Guides metaphor was developed at Apple to reduce the cognitive load on learners navigating a large hypermedia database. Within Alice we use the Guides metaphor to allow online shoppers to classify themselves. We discuss the link between Alice Guides and Kozinet’s notion of e-tribes or Virtual Communities of Consumption. Our second interface metaphor Dynamic Queries (coupled with Starfield displays) allow users to very quickly find relevant items by displaying the results of queries, posed via specialised slider widgets, within 100 milliseconds. We have constructed a tool, Quiver, which constructs Dynamic Query interfaces on-the-fly as the result of queries to knowledge models stored on the Alice server.

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Author information

Author notes

  1. Maria Martins

    Present address: Business School, The University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK

  2. Helgi Pertusson

    Present address: cTarget Inc., Brautarholt 1, 105, Reykjavik, Iceland

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    John Domingue, Maria Martins, Jaicheng Tan & Arthur Stutt

  2. Innn Inc., Laugavegur 26, 101, Reykjavik, Iceland

    Helgi Pertusson

Authors
  1. John Domingue
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  2. Maria Martins
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  3. Jaicheng Tan
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  4. Arthur Stutt
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  5. Helgi Pertusson
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus de Montegancedo, s/n, 28660, Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain

    Asunción Gómez-Pérez

  2. Intelligent Software Components, S.A. (iSOCO), Francisca Delgado, 11 - 2∘, 28108, Alcobendas, Madrid, Spain

    V. Richard Benjamins

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Domingue, J., Martins, M., Tan, J., Stutt, A., Pertusson, H. (2002). Alice: Assisting Online Shoppers through Ontologies and Novel Interface Metaphors. In: Gómez-Pérez, A., Benjamins, V.R. (eds) Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: Ontologies and the Semantic Web. EKAW 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2473. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45810-7_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45810-7_30

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44268-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45810-4

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