An Ontology based product recommendation system for next generation e-retail

Abstract

The number of e-commerce resources has increased considerably. Thus, it has become important for sellers to be able to quickly recommend products to potential buyers. Some product recommendation systems developed for this purpose. However, due to the lack of semantics, the systems’ success in recommending accurate products according to user preferences is low. In this study carried out within the scope of a state-funded R&D project, an ontology-based personalized product recommendation system named E-Prod was developed. E-Prod tracks various e-commerce systems in real time and transfers the product information to the ontology model. E-Prod uses a novel recommendation approach that combines machine learning and semantic matching to provide personalized recommendations. The system learns user’s preferences based on semantic relationships between products by monitoring their behaviors. In this way, accurate recommendations are made by semantic matching between products and user preferences. E-Prod has been tested with over 250 registered users and compared to traditional collaborative recommendations in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall. As a result, E-Prod outperformed traditional methods by 92.79% accuracy, 92.93% precision, and 90.58% recall. Within the scope of this study, E-Prod covers the clothing, shoes, and bag retail sectors. However, it provides a generic infrastructure for new generation e-commerce systems. Its reusable modules can be adapted to any domain.