Enabling global price comparison through semantic integration of web data
Hongwei Zhu, Stuart Madnick, Michael D. Siegel · International Journal of Electronic Business · 2008
"Sell and shop globally" has been seen as a potential benefit of electronic business. A step toward realising this benefit is to know how things are selling worldwide. Global price comparison services would address this need. But there have not been many such services. We use a global price dispersion case study to illustrate the value of such services. Then we identify technology challenges, including semantic heterogeneity, in providing such services. We propose a mediation architecture to address the semantic heterogeneity problem, and demonstrate its feasibility with a prototype that enables global price comparison using web sources in several countries.