A configurable system for the construction of adaptive virtual stores

With the recent expansion of the Internet, the interest towards electronic sales has quickly grown and many tools have been built to help vendors to set up their Web stores. These tools offer all the facilities for building the store databases and managing the order processing and secure payment transactions, but they typically do not focus on issues like the personalization of the interaction with the customers. However, Web surfers are generally heterogeneous and have different needs and preferences; moreover, the trend of marketing strategies is to pay more and more attention to the specific buyers. So, the importance of personalizing the interaction with the user and the product presentation is increasing. In this paper, we describe the architecture of a configurable virtual Web store supporting personalized hypertextual interactions with users. Our system builds a user profile by applying user modeling techniques and stereotypical information about the characteristics of customer groups; this profile is used during the interaction in order to tailor the product descriptions and the selection of items to recommend to the user's needs, varying the layout of the hypertextual pages and the detail of the descriptions accordingly. Tailoring the system's behavior requires the parallel execution of several complex tasks during the interaction (e.g. identifying the user's preferences, selecting the products most suited to her, dynamically generating the hypertextual pages). Therefore, we have defined a multiagent architecture where these tasks are executed by different agents, which cooperate offering specific services to each other. In our system, the domain-dependent knowledge, concerning information about products and customer features, is declaratively represented and clearly separated from the domain-independent components, which represent the core of the virtual store. This separation has the advantage that our architecture can be easily instantiated on several sales domains, therefore obtaining different Web stores out of a single shell. Our system is developed in a Java-based environment and the overall architecture includes the prototype of a virtual store and the configuration tools which can be used to set up a new store on a specific sales domain.