5. Apparel WebCat
Apparel WebCat
integrates clothing catalogs. They are the catalogs whose printed versions first promoted the products of fashion houses and departmental store chains. Lately, due to the expansion of the electronic commerce, most of these catalogs became available on the Web.As an example we integrated three catalogs:
Eddie Bauer, Gap and JC Penney. They can be found at: [http://www.eddiebauer.com/eb/ShopEB/frame_line.asp],[http://www.gap.com], and [http://shopping.jcpenney.com/jcp/indev.asp], respectively.
For each of the virtual catalogs that we built, we constructed a specific user interface. The user interface is implemented as an HTML form that communicates with the Query Engine via CGI scripts. We present the user interface for Apparel WebCat in Figure 6.
The interface reflects the ontology of the domain; also it allows users to make multiple selection at the first level above the leaves. In the clothing catalog, for example, the user can select an item such as T-shirt from menswear and a dress from womenswear; as a consequence, WebCat retrieves both categories.
In the example (see Figure 6), we query for menswear shirts, dress shirts, and T-shirts. Moreover, additional conditions can be specified. In our case, we query for regular size type with X, XL, XXL size, in any of the colors: white, red or navy with prices between $10 and $75 and being on sale. Here by "regular size" we mean one of the following size types: "small", "regular", "tall".
Part of the answer returned by the system is presented in Figure 7. We display the answer with respect to the additional attributes that describe the leaves (products). The answer can be ordered according to any of the attributes. An additional attribute is present, the product description, which is displayed if the user clicks on the product name.
The "Buy!" icon leads to the product itself. Because we store the URL of the products in our virtual catalog, the icon is a hyperlink to the product
.
Figure 6: The Apparel WebCat User Interface
Figure 7: The Apparel WebCat result file
