An Interactive Approach of Online Software Customization via Conversational Web Agents

Aimed at extending online retail beyond ordinary goods in support of customized software products, this paper designs an abstract requirement model to capture the general knowledge of service-oriented software product lines. It then proposes a framework to allow software engineers transferring their skills to an ontology-based domain model by creating an instantiation of the abstract model. In the proposed framework, this ontology-based model is used by POMDP-based dialogue management to enable conversational Web agents acting in the Internet as the virtual representation of software engineers, engaging in dialogue with software clients in natural language, and finding out their needs for customized software. In addition to technical details, this paper also includes experiments in the customization of an online bookstore system to explain the operation and illustrate advantages of the proposed approach.