Buyer's customized directory management over sellers' e-catalogs

Abstract

There are a multitude of seller-centric e-marketplaces in the B2B EC environment. As the name implies, they are not organized from the buying organization’s point of view. So the buying organization needs to define the buyer-centric directory about the external e-marketplaces. This is particularly important in e-procurement systems. Recently the one-to-one e-catalog approach is attempted to allow the buyer to select a sub-directory from a seller’s directory. This is a helpful screening capability, but there are still several problems to be resolved such as the mismatched level of details, directory depth unbalance, and changed category names. Besides, the integration of multiple sellers’ e-catalogs and maintaining consistency with the dynamically changing sellers’ e-catalogs should be supported. To overcome these problems, the logic programming approach is adopted to represent the structure of both buyers` and sellers` directories. Predicates as directory definition language can effectively represent the buyer`s extraction of relevant parts from sellers’ directories. The crudely selected directory can be modified by five directory modification rules. To validate this paper, a prototype system MyDirectory is developed with a Prolog language. This prototype system shows that the top down control algorithm in applying the modification rules can improve the depth and balance of directory significantly.