🚀 go-pugleaf

Intelligent Electronic Catalogs

                         November 25th, 1998, 9:30-17:00

                             Hotel Ambassador, Bern

        [ The general assembly of SGAICO will be held during this
meeting ]

In traditional commerce, merchants compete not only on price, but also
on the service they offer to their
customers. Good salespeople understand their customer's wishes and are
skilled at matching them to the
products which fit them best. 
In electronic commerce, such functions have to be carried out by the
catalogue, typically a WWW site that the
customer interacts with. Providing such a web site with intelligence can
make it much more attractive, for
example by offering: 

     Search functionalities for finding products according to complex
criteria. 
     Matching techniques that help the customer formulate his wishes by
comparing them with those of
     others. 
     Configuration functions that compose products out of several parts. 
     Filtering and visualization functions that display only what the
customer needs to see. 

Please find the detailed program and registration information under this
URL:

http://liawww.epfl.ch/~faltings/ecsymp.html

Fee:    Extremely attractive, only SFr. 65 per participant, 

	which includes lunch, coffee breaks, and copies of the notes.
	The rest of the cost is covered by non-profit sponsoring (SGAICO and
 	similar organisations)

Please inform your colleagues !

Further aspects to be covered:
This symposium concentrates on techniques for generating such catalog
web sites in an intelligent way. It will
present a variety of techniques from the three key competences required
for such systems: 

     Data representation 
     Reasoning and inference techniques 
     User interaction and visualization 

Special consideration will be given to the question of how these
techniques can be implemented in the context of
WWW servers. The symposium will both discuss future directions and open
research issues as well as provide
directly usable techniques for developers of product catalogs and
company WWW sites. 

Register as soon as possible, thank you.
Ren� Bach
-- 
Ren� Bach - SGAICO secretary            22a, rue de la Rebatte
rbach@access.ch (priv�)                 2068 Hauterive
rene@acm.org    (permanent)             (032) 753 34 36