Symmetric adaptive customer modeling in an electronic store

Electronic Commerce (EC) is currently one of the fastest growing and most practically relevant application areas of distributed systems technologies. It is based on the economic aspects of commercial trading patterns combined with distributed computing systems technology. It is a market environment that is characterized by low transaction costs, a large number of market participants, and easy online access to services and goods offered. It also implies a set of rules and policies for the successful organization of business transactions. EC involves more than simple online transactions, it encompasses diverse activities as conducting market research, identifying opportunities and partners, cultivating relationships with customers and suppliers, document exchange and customer modeling. Our paper deals with the latter aspect of EC. We introduce here a model for developing a symmetric adaptive system for EC on the World Wide Web. Our main contribution is that the model is, by all means, symmetric: we model both customers and goods and make both their profiles change as a consequence of a customer buying a certain product. The symmetry in our model greatly simplifies the approach and the queries, giving some insights on the formalization of the allowed queries that were, in way, unexpected. Furthermore, the model itself can provide an easy-to-evaluate measure for the confidence in adapting its response to any given customer and is able to provide useful feedback to the manager, then allowing, so to speak, “manual adjustment” that can help the behaviour of the system in the future