WEBSELL: Intelligent Sales Assistants for the World Wide Web 1 Introduction E-commerce offers many advantages and opportunities;however these benefits come at the cost of not having a human sales-person in the sales process. The sales-person facilitates the sales process by helping customers identify what their requirements are and then by identifying what products best meet these requirements. In the absence of this human support for the sales process in e-commerce there is a need to develop intelligent virtual sales agents that will fill these roles. This was the objective of the ESPRIT-IV project WEBSELL that completed in January 2000. The WEBSELL consortium includes four commercial companies (tec:inno GmbH, Germany, Adwired One to One Communication AG, Switzerland, IMS MAXIMS plc., Ireland, IWT Magazin Verlag GmbH, Germany) and two Universities (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and University of Kaiserslautern, Germany). WEBSELL has developed new intelligent sales support technology that supports Web shoppers in two aspects of the sales process which have been previously neglected: helping the user identify and articulate their requirements and identifying the products best suited to those requirements. To enable maximum flexibility, the WEBSELL software has been designed as a modular architecture (see Figure 1) that includes components for: 68959

• representation of product data and knowledge, 

• dialogue with the customer (Pathways), 

• product search through case-based retrieval, 

• personalization and collaborative recommendation, 

• product presentation, 

• product customisation.

These components communicate with each other through specialised XML-based protocols and can be combined in a flexible manner. The different components draw on techniques from case-based reasoning, decision tree based protocol systems, user profiling, and collaborative recommendation. 

The WEBSELL architecture is appropriate for a single busi-ness that is selling a range of products (e.g. technical equipment) or for a middleman that is brokering a range of products (e.g. hotel bookings). Building a solution for a specific clientthen corresponds to configuring a set of components and integrating the resulting system into the environment at the client’s side. Whenever additional functionality is needed, new services may be added. Likewise, existing systems can easily be integrated by implementing a specific component organizing the necessary communication between the external systemand the affected WEBSELL components. 

Today, the WEBSELL architecture has been used in a large number of applications that are in daily use, some of which are sketched in section 6 of this paper. Each of the following sections 2-5 gives a brief overview of one of the WEBSELL components. Pathways: The Customer Dialog ComponentA WEBSELL pathway is a decision tree that guides the user through questions, information and decision logic to arrive at adescription of the user’s requirements. Pathways are created using the Pathways Builder tool and executed or navigated using the Pathways Server. The output from the navigation of a pathway is the data gathered or computed during the run; the output is in a customisable format, usually XML. 

Pathways allows developers to produce dialogues that will elicit a user’s requirements using a combination of standard html pages with platform independent Javascript. The user can navigate forward and backwards through the dialog, changing answers if required. 

The Pathways Builder (see Figure 2) supports the developer in creating a web-based agent that gathers customer requirements.

B.原文的翻译

网络销售：万维网的智能销售助理

1引言

电子商务提供了许多优势和机会;然而，这些优势体现在销售人员在销售过程中所产生的成本上。销售人员有利于帮助客户确定他们的需求是什么，然后在销售过程中通过识别哪些产品最能满足这些要求。在电子商务销售过程中缺少这种销售人员的支持，于是有必要制定智能虚拟销售代理，来填补这些角色。这是WEBSELL公司的ESPRIT-IV项目在2000年的一月份完成的目标。该WEBSELL公司财团包括四个商业公司（TEC：INNO有限公司，德国，Adwired一对一的通信公司，瑞士，IMS MAXIMS PLC，爱尔兰，IWT Magazin Verlag有限公司，德国）和两所大学（都柏林三一学院，爱尔兰和凯撒斯劳滕工业大学，德国）。 WEBSELL公司已开发出新的智能销售支持技术，支持网络购物者在以前的销售过程中被忽视的2个方面：帮助用户识别并表达自己的需求，并确定最符合那些需求的产品。使灵活性达到最大限度，WEBSELL公司的软件已被设计为一个模块化的架构（见图1），包括组件：