Narrow Results

In the e-commerce arena new methods and tools have been recently developed to improve and customize the e-commerce web sites, according to users' necessities and preferences, that are usually vague and uncertain. The most successful tool in this field has been the Recommender Systems. Their aim is to assist e-shops customers to find out the most suitable products by using recommendations. Sometimes, these systems face situations where there is a lack of information or the information is vague or imprecise that yield unsuccessful results. Although several solutions have been proposed, they still present some limitations. In this paper, we present a Knowledge-Based Recommender System that manages and models the uncertainty related to users' preferences by using linguistic information. This system will overcome the problem of lack of information by computing recommendations through completing incomplete linguistic preference relations provided by the users.

E-services can be used to wrap an organization's information system and to provide a standard interface that enables cooperation with other information systems. As a consequence, e-services should not only support operating activities, but also embed mechanisms for inter-organizational coordination and control over operating activities. Inter-organizational coordination and control are based on contractual agreements that coordinate processes across cooperating companies and establish mechanisms to control the fulfillment of production goals. The objective of this paper is to describe a methodological approach for the design of e-services that supports the specification of inter-organizational coordination and control requirements. The paper explains how the methodology is structured in three phases, from requirements specification to conceptual design and implementation. The first phase of the methodology supports the specification of cooperation requirements, which constitute the static description of coordination and control requirements. In the second methodological phase, this static description is completed with a dynamic description of the actions to be taken upon exceptions, which occur when cooperating partners do not comply with cooperation goals. The static and dynamic description of coordination and control represent a conceptual specification of a business transaction. In the final methodological phase, this conceptual specification is implemented based on the WSDL and BPEL4WS languages for e-service design. The methodology is tested on the case study of the Italian production district of Matera.

More and more websites have started to apply intelligent techniques to conduct effective and flexible operations and provide high-quality and personalized online services. One of the explicit manifestations of website intelligence is that web-based information flow directs and guides a related human flow. This paper chooses Sino-Australian as a case to explore how information flow directs a study-abroad human flow through providing intelligent e-services. An evaluation system with the case is conducted to prove the rationality of the directing function and process.