is prohibited.
purchase and delivery, and (6) product service and evaluation. There are various
types of agents existing for different stages. Therefore, the knowledge base for each
type of agent is different.
The most well-known e-commerce agents are product brokering agents, also called
comparison-shopping agents or shopping bots. The main function of these agents
is to help users find their favorite products with certain constraints such as price,
quality, and delivery time. Such agents will first assist users to construct their queries
with current knowledge about product definitions, which is called ontology here.
Then they will be able to locate thousands of merchants with specific products or
services, and scour through millions of items. Finally, they may sort the results or
offers and present them to users.
There are two main bottlenecks for deploying agents in such applications. One is
that most Internet stores do not provide facilities to support or serve visiting agents.
Either the Internet stores do not allow agents to access product information, or agents
do not have such capability to acquire information from the stores.
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