SHOPPINGMATE · ShoppingMate: A location- and context- aware service for assisting consumers during their shopping time

The main objective of the proposed ShoppingMate project is the conceptualization, design, implementation and demonstration of a novel mobile application that will allow mobile consumers to: - describe in an intuitive semantic way the characteristics of an item(s) they want to purchase (e.g. an intelligent toy for a 7-year old girl that is small size and does not cost more than 30 euros), - perform an intelligent search in a shopping area to locate shops that offer this category of product, - get, in an intuitive way and at as much detail as required, the matching products found, - formulate a shopping plan, and finally, - get directions to the selected shop(s) according to the plan. ShoppingMate will research the state-of-the-art of all relevant Web 2.0 technologies, extend them as needed to achieve project objectives, and finally combine them in an end-to-end prototypical platform for mobile shopping support that will be much more powerful than anything else that comes close to this vision and is available today. The project will design a flexible user interface that supports menu-driven, free text, and natural language based capture of user requests. It will provide to participating shop owners the flexibility to incrementally introduce new item categories to the system and control the level of detail provided for each item. A semantic representation of both the user requests and the items offered for sale through the system will facilitate efficient semantic searching and matching. Semantic data representation will be performed using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) which is a semantic markup language for publishing and sharing ontologies on the World Wide Web. The ShoppingMate platform will be designed with user privacy in mind and will not require that the participating consumers provide any personal information, or expose their identity, profile and shopping preferences in order to get serviced by participating stores.