An Integrated Environment for the Development of Knowledge-Based Recommender Applications

TLDR

Online selling platforms offer complex product assortments, making selection challenging, and customers vary in expertise, so intelligent recommender systems provide personalized dialogues to support product selection. The paper introduces CWAdvisor, a domain‑independent, knowledge‑based recommender environment that delivers appropriate solutions, uncovers additional selling opportunities, and explains its recommendations. CWAdvisor employs model‑based diagnosis, personalization, and intuitive knowledge‑acquisition techniques across multiple domains, and its industrial deployment experience demonstrates successful evaluation of recommender applications. Industrial projects demonstrate that CWAdvisor’s recommender applications are successfully deployed and evaluated. Keywords: end‑user programming, knowledge acquisition, knowledge‑based recommenders, model‑based diagnosis, personalization, recommender systems, testing recommender knowledge bases.

Abstract

Abstract The complexity of the product assortments offered by on-line selling platforms makes selection a challenging task. Customers differ in respect to expertise and product knowledge, but intelligent recommender systems offer personalized dialogues that support the product-selection process. This paper describes CWAdvisor, a domain-independent, knowledge-based recommender environment that provides users with consistently appropriate solutions, identifies additional selling opportunities, and explains solutions. The discussion uses examples from several application domains to show how model-based diagnosis, personalization, and intuitive knowledge-acquisition techniques support customer-oriented sales dialogues. Experience obtained in industrial projects is reported, and successfully deployed recommender applications are evaluated. Keywords: End-user programmingknowledge acquisitionknowledgebased recommendersmodel-based diagnosispersonalizationrecommender systemstesting recommender knowledge bases