Knowledge maps for composite e-services: A mining-based system platform coupling with recommendations

Providing various c-services on the Internet by enterprises is an important trend in c-business. Composite e-services, which consist of various e-services provided by different e-service providers, are complex processes that require the cooperation among cross-organizational e-service providers. The flexibility and success of e-business depend on effective knowledge support to access related information resources of composite e-services. Thus, providing effective knowledge support for accessing composite e-services is a challenging task. This work proposes a knowledge map platform to provide an effective knowledge support for utilizing composite e-services. A data mining approach is applied to extract knowledge patterns from the usage records of composite e-services. Based on the mining result, topic maps are employed to construct the knowledge map. Meanwhile, the proposed knowledge map is integrated with recommendation capability to generate recommendations for composite e-services via data mining and collaborative filtering techniques. A prototype system is implemented to demonstrate the proposed platform. The proposed knowledge map enhanced with recommendation capability can provide users customized decision support to effectively utilize composite e-services. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.