Ontology-Based Intelligent System for E-Marketing

The need for intelligent shopping agents has grown as a result of the vast amount of information available to internet consumers. However, most of the currently available intelligent shopping agents only request consumers to define the criteria of the product in terms of price range and product features required. In order to satisfy internet consumers' needs, intelligent agents should also consider more aspects. Usually, before internet consumers make buying decisions, they may consider several psychological factors such as whether they like: famous brand name products; new style products; high-quality products, same products; lower-price products, etc. They may not only consider product features but also different businesses have different e-marketing mix elements, namely Product, Price, Promotion, Place, Personalization, Privacy, Customer Service, Community, Site, Security and Sales Promotion, which target different customers' preferences. In this research, four new streams are integrated: 1) Discovery of new psychological factors in the E-Commerce environment, 2) The relationship between psychological factors and e-marketing mix elements, 3) Creation of an ontology to codify the relationship between psychological factors and e-marketing mix elements and then 4) Development of an intelligent shopping agent based on the ontology. The intelligent shopping agent can provide services to both businesses and consumers such that businesses can acquire their target customers and at the same time customers can get their ideal business web sites to buy their desired products by mapping the psychological factors of internet consumers with businesses' e-marketing mix elements. In this way both parties benefit.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo