Applying Hypothetical Queries to E-Commerce Systems to Support Reservation and Personal Preferences

Online travel continues to be one of the most successful e-commerce categories on the Internet. As increasing number of people book online, existing e-ticket systems can not satisfy customers\´ growing demand. Customers complain about most of the current e-ticket systems for the lack of "reservation" functionality. They also complain that these systems are not "intelligent" enough as a traditional travel agent who can deal with more complicated personal preferences. In this paper, we propose a transaction model for e-commerce system to support reservation functionality while balancing the benefits and risks of both customers and airlines. We introduce the theory of hypothetical query to avoid unnecessary transactions and rollbacks on underlying database. Hypothetical queries can be generated automatically and transformed into relational algebra queries which can be optimized with conventional techniques. We extend the lazy approach for evaluating hypothetical queries with integrity constraints to deal with customers\´ personal preferences. We also provide the "watch" and "remind" mechanism to help customers to purchase their most desirable tickets. Although we have chosen ticket booking system as our target application, the framework presented in this paper is also applicable to other e-commerce systems.