Architecture of XRML-based comparison shopping mall and its performance on delivery cost estimation

With the growh of internet shopping malls, there is increasing interest in comparison shopping mall. However most comparison sites compare only book prices by collecting simple XML data and do not provide the exact comparison including precise shipping costs. Shipping costs vary depending on customer's address, the delivery method, and the category of selected goods, so rule based system is required in order to calculate exact shipping costs. Therefore, we designed and implemented comparison shopping mall which compares not only book prices but also shipping costs using rule based inference. By adopting the eXtensible Rule Markup Language (XRML) approach, we proposed the methodology of extracting delivery rules from Web pages of each shopping mall. The XRML approach can facilitate nearly automatic rule extraction from Web pages and consistency maintenance between Web pages and rule base. We developed a ConsiderD system which applies our rule acquisition methodology based on XRML. The objective of the ConsiderD system is to compare the exact total cost of books including the delivery cost over Amazon.com, BarnesNoble.com, and Powells.com. With this prototype, we conducted an experiment to show the potential of automatic rule acquisition from Web pages and illustrate the effect of delivery cost.