A Study on Design and Implementation of Automatic Product Information Indexing and Retrieval System for Online Comparison Shopping on the Web

웹 상의 온라인 비교 쇼핑을 위한 상품 정보 자동 색인 및 검색 시스템의 설계 및 구현에 대한 연구

In this paper, we describe the approaches of shopping agents and directory services for online comparison shopping on the web, and propose an information indexing and retrieval system, named InfoEye, with a new method for automatic extraction of product information. The developed method is based on the knowledge about presentation of the product information on the Web. The method from the knowledge about presentation of the product information is derived from both the point that online stores display their products to customers in easy-to-browse ways and heuristics made of analyses of product information look-and-feel of domestic online stores. In indexing process, the method is applied to product information extraction from Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents collected by a mirroring robot from online stores. We have made InfoEye to a readily usable stage and transferred the technology to Webnara commercial shopping engine. The proposed system is a cutting-edge solution to help customers as a shopping expert by providing information about the reasonable price of a product from dozens of online stores, saving customers shopping time, giving information about new products, and comparing quality factors of products in a same category.