In electronic commerce or providing information on the Internet, one of the major focuses is how to attract and keep people visiting the website. Having more advertisement through ordinary advertising channel? Providing more useful/unique information? Having an attractive site design? How about making the visitor feel comfortable, easy, and efficient to get the information that they desire from the site? Internet users are now facing the problem of feeling lost in the information space (Info Sphere) because huge amount of information is pushed into the Internet, especially in the electronic catalogue websites. The problem of information labyrinth makes users unable to locate the information they need/want easily and effectively. One way to solve such problem and help users to seek the d...[ Read more ]

In electronic commerce or providing information on the Internet, one of the major focuses is how to attract and keep people visiting the website. Having more advertisement through ordinary advertising channel? Providing more useful/unique information? Having an attractive site design? How about making the visitor feel comfortable, easy, and efficient to get the information that they desire from the site? Internet users are now facing the problem of feeling lost in the information space (Info Sphere) because huge amount of information is pushed into the Internet, especially in the electronic catalogue websites. The problem of information labyrinth makes users unable to locate the information they need/want easily and effectively. One way to solve such problem and help users to seek the desired information is to customize the website for each individual user.

Information customization means providing the information to suit a user's need / demand. As different users have different goals when they come to visit a site, the site should be able to customize itself to provide the information that fit the users' need. This means limiting the set of information presented to the users by knowing what the users desire. As the set of information presented to the users is reduced, the information becomes more relevant to them. Then the users will not be confused by the irrelevant information and get lost easily in the information space. Furthermore, the information retrieval process will become easier and efficient.

In order to achieve the goal of customizing website for each individual user, we should know about the users. In other words, before any customization can be done, the user information should be collected either explicitly or implicitly. By performing data analysis on the collected information, the user profile for individual user can be constructed. Then from the user profile, the user's preference and interest are known. The website can be customized for each user automatically when he/she browses through the website. Actually, the three steps, i.e. user data collection, data analysis, and customization, can be treated as an on going process to improve and customize the website for each individual user. Therefore, in this thesis, a Personalized Electronic Catalogue (PEC) System is proposed. With this system, the customization process can be done on fly, without any need for the Webmaster to interfere the normal operation. In this thesis, the design and implementation of the PEC System are introduced.