Symmetric adaptive customer modeling for electronic commerce in a distributed environment

Abstract

Electronic Commerce involves more than simple online transactions, it also deals with several other fields such as market research, customers care, document exchange and customer modeling. Our paper deals with the customer modeling issue, first introduced in the companion paper [4], where a model is presented of a system that can adapt its response to customers. We present here the necessary extension to the model so that it can be used on a distributed system for EC on the World Wide Web. The extensions presented are simple, easy to implement, not computationally expensive, and preserve the privacy of all the actors in an EC distributed system, while ensuring the adaptive behaviour.