Customizing Web-based Mass Information System

The research project "Customizing Web-based Mass Information Systems (WMIS): Gathering and Using Customer Profiles to Efficiently Analyze and Manage Electronic Consumer Markets" deals with conceptual, marketing- oriented aspects of WMIS analysis and design with a special emphasis on the integration of adaptive system components for supporting negotiations, market segmentation, targeted direct marketing initiatives, and transaction processing. Although infrastructural aspects will be discussed, the described project primarily aims at validating the usually technically determined state of the art of WMIS by integrating established economic concepts and theories. Being supported by Prof. Dr. H. R. Hansen, the habilitation thesis together with the corresponding research activities are part of the electronic commerce-program of the Department of Management Information Systems (Vienna University of Economics & Business Administration). Focusing on the added value created for individual companies, my research agenda includes the identification of necessary preconditions for adaptive technologies, an in-depth analysis of the evolution of distributed hypertext environments, as well as the development of a methodology for gathering and using customer information in electronic markets. As a result from reduced barriers to market entry, WMIS transactions are more dynamic and potentially less predictable than their traditional counterparts. This is one of the reasons why socio-cultural characteristics of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular have to be considered as external parameters by the participating institutions when designing their retail applications. For modeling the culturally determined attributes and preferences of customers, a user-centric empirical validation of hypotheses will be conducted, comparing Anglo-American and European customer segments. This validation has to consider existing standardized description models like the Open Profiling Standard (OPS) or the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3) and will provide valuable insights for the personalization of WMIS regarding geographic and demographic segmentation criteria. Based on these insights and observable shifts within the corporate value chain (e.g., the convergence of production and communication), a methodology for integrating customer-specific information into retailing applications of WMIS will be developed. For this reason the user-centric and document- oriented eW3DT-metamodel (extended World Wide Web Design Technique) for the description of WMIS has to be modified and - as a prototypical, platform-independent implementation in Java - will be employed to provide a visual framework for analyzing access patterns of WMIS customers. In this way the author plans to enhance the current, in most cases only statistically oriented representations used by commercially available Web-Tracking-Software with a map-like view analogous to customer tracking in traditional retaling outlets (Web-Mapping).