TaxoMulti: Rule-Based Expert System to Customize Product Taxonomies for Multi-Channel E-commerce

Abstract

AbstractTaxonomies are used as product categories to facilitate users navigating through an e-commerce portal with the help of hierarchically structured concepts. However, the identical taxonomy is shown to each customer regardless of the channel used. This is challenging for the customers in terms of user experience, as the screen size is rigid, and has not a flexible format like a printed catalog. Simply reducing the taxonomy as suggested in existing works is not sufficient, as it leads to semantic misrepresentation of the product domain. To overcome the inflexibility of product taxonomies, the rule-based expert system TaxoMulti is presented in this paper. The main objectives of our descriptive research are the formulation of the taxonomy over- and undersize problem in multi-channel context, before different types of flexible mediator concepts are discussed that allow overcoming these challenges. Using our novel method, marketing experts can now provide different taxonomies including the same semantics to be shown on different channels. The method is implemented using logic programming, allowing the integration of an inference engine utilizing background knowledge without changing the underlying logic of the used information (management) system. The comprehensive experiments on three public and private databases highlight the improvement when adding different types of mediator concepts for the adaption process. Compared to existing best performing works in related fields, TaxoMulti has achieved an improvement of + 26.31 % for the reduction of the taxonomy, + 60 % for the enlargement of the taxonomy, and + 21.21 % in terms of flexibility.