Conceptual Design of Electronic Product Catalogs Using Object-Oriented Hypermedia Modeling Techniques

The application of conceptual models that assure both the consistency and usability of Electronic Product Catalogs (EPC's) is a main concern in the e-commerce community, mainly due to the impact a correct design of such interfaces has on the final e-store sales figures. This article describes how the OO-HMethod web-interface modeling approach can be successfully applied to the design of Business to Consumer (B2C) application interfaces. In order to address the specific domain semantics, OO-HMethod adds a new concept called `dimension attribute`, which is extracted from the datawarehouse field, and defines a comparison function applicable to these attributes. Also, a set of e-commerce Interface Usability Patterns that address some design problems likely to appear on the different store components and a materialization strategy are introduced to complete our proposal. The use of patterns to capture the semantics specifically related to e-commerce applications, and to manage the know...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ER
• Authors: Cristina Cachero, Jaime Gómez, Oscar Pastor
• Keywords: Database, E-commerce Interface Usability, ER 2000, Final E-store Sales, Web-interface Modeling Approach