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This editor is phase two of a more
elaborate project. The goal of all these pieces is to create a products and services search engine. The search sites that we use are good when we search for ideas, but are of no help when it comes to search for products and services. A concept of location exists when we talk about products. If I search for a restaurant for tonight meal, the answer should show me restaurants in a near area. If I search for books of Moliere, published in the last century, I expected an answer of antique dealer from all over the world; I am not in a hurry and can wait for shipping. The respond should be the information about the product and not only a link to a dealer web site. I don't want to follow each link, navigate in the maze of all sites. My query page will show me in a table the list of dealers who satisfied the criteria of my search. This list will be sortable in ascending or descending order on each column in the table. This way, I can see who is the nearest, who is the cheaper and which one offer the longest warranty, etc... This query can also be delayed in time. I can ask for a new sound system in the range $400.00 - $450.00 closing on the May 15 1998. This is the most direct link between dealers and customers. What a dream for a dealer to know that somewhere, someone is ready to buy his product. He does not need to advertise, customers come to him base on product definition. For this to happen, we need a more sophisticated query form. The form is not the same for a meal or for a book. This should be very dynamic. Phase one of the project was devoted to that part. Proto was created for lightweight form creation. To be able to merge response from many dealers, we should have a common understanding of a product. Each category of product will have a DTD. Phase two take care of that. With Visual XML, you can in collaboration with other of the same business industry, create DTD that define a product. Phase three will be the search in local database or/and a broadcast of agent's software carrying with them the query; an async server will collect answers and feed the user table. Phase four will be the integration of the three phases describes above. I search site where you can create your profile for later re-use, a tree of products categories, base on the product category chosen, a query page and a search button. The respond will show in a table the result of the query. This table can be manipulates in many ways. Links can be follow to go directly at a particular dealer product description. Or e-commerce can be done at the search site allowing the user to put it in a product basket and order it. The search site will send the transaction to the appropriate dealer. © 1997-99 9036-6733 Québec Inc. All rights reserved. |