Acquiring customers' requirements in electronic commerce

A key role for Artificial Intelligence technology in electronic commerce is in finding products and services that meet a user's requirements. This may be implemented as a three-stage process of requirements elicitation, product search, and finally product presentation. Alternatively the search of the product space may happen in tandem with the requirements elicitation process. It is also possible to use product presentation as a mechanism to focus and give context to requirements elicitation. A variety of different approaches to this issue of matching products to requirements have been explored in AI research. Thus, while the focus in this paper is on different approaches to requirements elicitation, these related issues of product search and product presentation are also discussed in detail. The paper concludes by placing the other papers in this special issue in the context of this structured overview.