Semantic Contextual Personalization of Virtual Stores

Virtual stores and showrooms gain increasing attention in e-commerce, marketing and merchandising to investigate customers’ behavior, preferences and the usefulness of shopping and exhibition spaces. Although virtual stores may be designed using numerous available 3D modeling tools and game engines, efficient methods and tools enabling development and personalization of virtual stores are still lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the development of personalizable contextual virtual stores that can be generated and configured on-demand, using interfaces based on semantic web technologies. A virtual store model is created as a combination of three elements: an exposition model, a collection of product models, and a virtual store configuration. The first element visually reflects an existing or imaginary 3D store layout. The second element contains 3D models of all products that can be presented in the exposition. The third element is an ontology, which connects the two previous elements using domain-specific knowledge and reasoning. Based on a virtual store model, a personalized virtual store is generated in response to a specific user’s request.