Woodstein : a Web interface agent for debugging e-commerce

Abstract

Woodstein is a software agent that works with a user's web browser to explain and help diagnose problems in web processes, such as purchases. It enables the user to inspect data items in ordinary web pages, revealing the processes that created them. It provides an integrated view of the processes and data associated with a user's actions at a web site, and retrieves related information on the same web site, or even on different web sites. When the user inspects data that looks incorrect, Woodstein helps manage hypotheses about causally related data and processes that look incorrect and provides guidance in the process of elimination to isolate the unsuccessful process or wrong data.