Using Ontological Reasoning for an Adaptive E-Commerce Experience

As e-commerce applications proliferates the Web, the authors are often overwhelmed by the task of sifting through the copious volumes of information. Since the nature of foraging for information in such digital spaces can be characterized as the interaction between internal task representation and the external problem domain, the authors look at how expert systems can be used to reduce complexity of the task. They describe a conceptual framework to analyze user interactions based on mental representations. They also detail an expert system implementation using the ontology language OWL to express the semantics of the representations and the rule language SWRL to define the rule base for contextual reasoning. The chapter illustrates how an expert system can be used to guide users in an e-commerce setting by orchestrating a cognitive fit between the task environment and the task solution.