Grant: Engage Grants Program

Software Guy Brokers is an Information Technology company that focuses on delivering e-commerce platform solutions to its customers that helps them in effectively maintaining their online business and also in optimizing their item catalog for efficient product classification in order to increase revenue generation. The integration of product and item information into the platform developed by Software Guy Brokers is through a proprietary licensed Etilize Spex dataset that contains over several million Information Technology and Consumer Electronics Stock-Keeping Units (SKUs). This dataset is used as the initial seed dataset that will eventually grow as the users enter additional item information into the e-commerce catalog. The main deficiency with the Spex dataset is that item descriptions are classified based on the manufacturers of the items. For instance, a blender will be classified close to a screw driver only because they are manufactured by the same producer although they do not have any semantic relevance or similarity. This simple issue gives rise to much more serious concerns for Software Guy Brokers: 1) Given that items are classified based on manufacturer in the Spec dataset, the items that are imported into the e-commerce catalog need to be re-shuffled under the acceptable categories in order for them to be usable; 2) As new item information is entered on top of the Spex dataset, such as the items not present in that dataset or information related to pricing, warranty, shipping information that are not maintained in Spex, inconsistencies can accumulate in the e-commerce catalog. For instance, two identical items may be entered multiple times with minor differences and inconsistent pricing that can result in customer dissatisfaction; and, 3) Customization in the e-commerce catalog can change the original format and content of the item information. For this reason, the integration of frequently updated versions of Spex has become a cumbersome and complex task. In light of these three important challenges that Software Guy Brokers faces, we will be looking at ways thatcan enhance the semantic description of e-commerce items in a way that would facilitate the resolution of those challenges. We will be mainly focusing on the use of Semantic Technologies for item annotation and description; multiple catalog integration; and, inconsistency identification and resolution.