Knowledge maps for composite e-services: A mining-based system platform coupling with recommendations

Abstract

Providing various e-services on the Internet by enterprises is an important trend in e-business. Composite e-services, which consist of various e-services provided by different e-service providers, are complex processes that require the cooperation among cross-organizational e-service providers. The flexibility and success of e-business depend on effective knowledge support to access related information resources of composite e-services. Thus, providing effective knowledge support for accessing composite e-services is a challenging task. This work proposes a knowledge map platform to provide an effective knowledge support for utilizing composite e-services. A data mining approach is applied to extract knowledge patterns from the usage records of composite e-services. Based on the mining result, topic maps are employed to construct the knowledge map. Meanwhile, the proposed knowledge map is integrated with recommendation capability to generate recommendations for composite e-services via data mining and collaborative filtering techniques. A prototype system is implemented to demonstrate the proposed platform. The proposed knowledge map enhanced with recommendation capability can provide users customized decision support to effectively utilize composite e-services.

Introduction

With the explosive growth of Internet, more enterprises are providing various e-services for collaborative commerce online to achieve competitive advantages. A complete service normally consists of various e-services, so by providing individual e-service online will not satisfy customer’s demands. Composite e-services, which consist of various e-services provided by different e-service providers, are more attractable to serve customers. Composite e-services are complex processes that require the cooperation among cross-organizational e-service providers. In such complex collaborative commerce environments, online users face the difficulty of how to select the appropriate composite e-services that suit their needs. Accordingly, an effective knowledge support system is essential to organize and access related information resources in e-service environments.

Many researches have focused on the dynamic composition of e-services and system platforms to provide composite e-services Balakrishnan, 2000, Casati and Shan, 2001, Piccinelli et al., 2001, Piccinelli and Williams, 2003, but very few researches consider managing information resources of composite e-services. Casati and Shan (2001) proposed a model to compose e-services dynamically. Balakrishnan (2000) proposed a Service Framework Specification to compose e-services. Several e-service platforms are proposed. For example, Hewlett-Packard e-speak and Microsoft.Net are such platforms that share many concepts and features. Basic features of these platforms are registering, advertising, monitoring, and managing e-services. However, conventional e-service platforms do not provide effective knowledge support for managing and accessing information resources of composite e-services.

Enterprises employ information technologies (ITs) to reuse valuable knowledge assets and carry out knowledge management activities Davenport and Prusak, 1998, Liebowitz, 1999. Knowledge repository and knowledge maps are widely used ITs to support knowledge storage, organization and dissemination. A knowledge map is a visual display of captured information and relationships, which enables efficient communication and learning of knowledge (Vail, 1999). Knowledge maps have been used by enterprises to manage and navigate enterprises’ explicit knowledge Chung et al., 2003, Eppler et al., 2001, Gordon, 2000, Kim et al., 2003. Accordingly, this work proposes a mining-based knowledge map platform to provide effective knowledge supports for utilizing information resources of composite e-services.

A data mining approach is employed to extract knowledge patterns from the usage records of composite e-services. The extracted knowledge patterns, which represent the important subjects and associations of composite e-services, form the kernel of the knowledge map. Moreover, e-service providers may use different types of system platform, making it difficult to communicate and exchange information resources. Thus, a topic map standard (ISO) was adopted to develop the proposed knowledge map, providing a bridge for managing and exchanging heterogeneous resources of composite e-services. Meanwhile, the proposed knowledge map is integrated with recommendation capability to generate recommendations of composite e-services via data mining and collaborative filtering techniques. Finally, a prototype system was developed to demonstrate the operations of the knowledge map for browsing information resources of composite e-services as well as the recommendations. The proposed knowledge map enhanced with recommendations can provide users customized decision support to effectively utilize composite e-services.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows; Section 2 introduces related work. Section 3 describes the system framework of the proposed knowledge map for composite e-services. The architecture and functionality of the system are illustrated in Section 4. Section 5 presents the integration of recommendations in the system. Section 6 demonstrates the prototype system. Conclusions and future works are finally made in Section 7.