Title: Enabling global price comparison through semantic integration of web data

Authors: Hongwei Zhu, Stuart E. Madnick, Michael D. Siegel

Addresses: College of Business and Public Administration, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA. ' Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. ' Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Abstract: ||Sell and shop globally|| has been seen as a potential benefit of electronic business. A step toward realising this benefit is to know how things are selling worldwide. Global price comparison services would address this need. But there have not been many such services. We use a global price dispersion case study to illustrate the value of such services. Then we identify technology challenges, including semantic heterogeneity, in providing such services. We propose a mediation architecture to address the semantic heterogeneity problem, and demonstrate its feasibility with a prototype that enables global price comparison using web sources in several countries.

Keywords: global price comparison; shopbots; semantic data integration; semantic heterogeneity; electronic business; e-business; mediation architecture; comparing prices.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEB.2008.020672

International Journal of Electronic Business, 2008 Vol.6 No.4, pp.319 - 341

Published online: 09 Oct 2008 *

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