Enabling Global Price Comparison with Semantic Integration of Web Data
Name
esd-wp-2008-03.pdf
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282.05 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
014df56c6841f4934b74134bbba3ab12
Author(s)
Zhu, Hongwei
Madnick, Stuart E.
Siegel, Michael D.
Date Issued
January 2008
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
Series/Report no.
ESD Working Papers;ESD-WP-2008-03
Abstract
“Sell Globally” and “Shop Globally” 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.
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