Enabling Global Price Comparison through Semantic Integration of Web Data

Hongwei Zhu, Michael Siegel and Stuart Madnick

Working papers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management

Abstract: €ܓell GloballyÂ€Ý and €ܓhop GloballyÂ€Ý have been seen as a potential benefit of web-enabled electronic business. One important step toward realizing this benefit is to know how things are selling in various parts of the world. A global price comparison service would address this need. But there have not been many such services. In this paper, we use a case study of global price dispersion to illustrate the need and the value of a global price comparison service. Then we identify and discuss several technology challenges, including semantic heterogeneity, in providing a global price comparison service. We propose a mediation architecture to address the semantic heterogeneity problem, and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture by implementing a prototype that enables global price comparison using data from web sources in several countries.

Keywords: Global Price Comparison; Shopbots; Context; Semantic Data Integration; Semantic Heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-01-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mkt
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