Developing a Shopbot with Multilingual Ontology for Global E-Commerce

Abstract

Language is an enormous barrier to global ecommerce. Internet users favor visiting or shopping on Web sites presented in their native language. This research proposes a shopbot with a multilingual ontology to overcome this language barrier. The shopbot, called WebShopper, collects product data from online vendors over the Web and enables customers to execute semantic searches using different languages. An empirical study is conducted to evaluate this shopbot. The result shows that customers are able to reach more products and find real bargains using WebShopper, and the proposed semantic search can improve search results and user satisfaction.