Product Finding on the Next Generation Web

Novel architectural concepts, technologies, and standards leading the way to the next generation Web will foster great new opportunities for all its participants. One of them will be the seamless integration of data and services. The original idea of the Semantic Web has led to the development of a great amount of further concepts and standards already, enabling heterogeneous and often proprietary systems to become compatible. Additionally, wireless network infrastructure is being established with a considerable progress. This enables services to become instantaneous and being much closer to consumers than before. In this contribution a case study is presented which shows how some of the new technologies can be put together to provide novel product finding services to consumers. Especially for multivariate product feature comparisons, taking into account also features and not only prices, searching is currently a rather elaborative task. Depending on the product category, repetitive searches over several days or weeks may be required (e.g. real estates) and feature comparison normally has to be done manually. The proposed system is able to instantly inform users about the appearance of products they would like to purchase on the market.