Journal of Management Information Systems

Volume 2 Number 4 1986 pp. 21-35

Shopping in the Electronic Marketplace

Lee, Ronald M and Widmeyer, George R

ABSTRACT: The concept of an electronic marketplace is introduced whereby consumers may browse through a structured database giving product offerings and local supply outlets. We consider the nature of software to facilitate the shopping process developing a concept of similarity between generic products using a semantic net structure. The search is guided by specified user preferences. A prototype implementation, using Prolog, is described.

Key words and phrases: database, semantic nets, telecommunications, logic programming, electronic commerce