Intelligent Electronic Catalogs for Sales Support Introducing Case-Based reasoning Techniques to On-Line Product Selection Applications

摘要

The number of electronic catalogs has grown rapidly during the past few years. Most of these catalogs use standard databases for storing and retrieving product information. Using ordinary databases for product catalogs, however, has the major drawack that it is often very difficult to find the products desired: very often, the database does not return a matching product at all or it returns many products that have to be examined manually. To overcome this problem, we propose the use of Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) techniques as an approach to requirement-oriented retrieval of products. CBR incorporates product knowledge into the database by means of a similarity measure. Recently, a number of commercial electronic catalogs based on CBR have been realized. We take a closer look at Analog Devices' on-line catalog of operational amplifiers, which helps an engineer to find a suitable amplifier for her specific requirements.