Multilingual Electronic Commerce in a Global Economy

Abstract

One of the major challenges facing organizations involved in electronic commerce (e-commerce) today is to organize and summarize information in such a way that end users can effectively and efficiently search for and analyze relevant information. Users can look for both structured as well as unstructured information in a system designed for electronic commerce. An example of structured information is the price of a specified product. Unstructured information, on the other hand, is information that is not well specified or that has multiple specifications. For example, the user may be looking for spices for cooking a shrimp dish where they can choose from a number of options. The user may have individual preferences1 for the selection of spices and may not know exactly how the information can be found in the system.