WO2000023922A1 - Decision platform for object comparison - Google Patents
Decision platform for object comparison Download PDFInfo
- Publication number
- WO2000023922A1 WO2000023922A1 PCT/AU1999/000893 AU9900893W WO0023922A1 WO 2000023922 A1 WO2000023922 A1 WO 2000023922A1 AU 9900893 W AU9900893 W AU 9900893W WO 0023922 A1 WO0023922 A1 WO 0023922A1
- Authority
- WO
- WIPO (PCT)
- Prior art keywords
- comparison
- objects
- properties
- priority value
- array
- Prior art date
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Classifications
-
- G—PHYSICS
- G06—COMPUTING; CALCULATING OR COUNTING
- G06Q—INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY [ICT] SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL OR SUPERVISORY PURPOSES; SYSTEMS OR METHODS SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL OR SUPERVISORY PURPOSES, NOT OTHERWISE PROVIDED FOR
- G06Q30/00—Commerce
- G06Q30/02—Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising
-
- G—PHYSICS
- G06—COMPUTING; CALCULATING OR COUNTING
- G06N—COMPUTING ARRANGEMENTS BASED ON SPECIFIC COMPUTATIONAL MODELS
- G06N5/00—Computing arrangements using knowledge-based models
- G06N5/04—Inference or reasoning models
Definitions
- the present invention relates a common decision platform for comparisons of one object to another. It is designed to compare objects, and give a result in the form of the nature of the relationship in a useful manner.
- the present invention provides a method of comparing properties of objects in a computer environment wherein said objects are defined by an array of elements describing a decision process, each element containing data related to a particular property or properties of its associated object and a rule or rules for comparison of the property with related properties in another object, the method comprising the steps of comparing associated properties within said objects according to said rule or rules provided by each element and allocating a priority value to said object indicating the state of the comparison of each property, said priority value being indicative of whether the object has qualified by a successful comparison, is qualifying or is disqualified by unsuccessful comparison.
- the array of elements in hierarchical in another embodiment is relational.
- said priority value is a numeric value with a first predetermined value representing the object has qualified, a second predetermined value representing the object has disqualifies and wherein a priority value between the first and second predetermined values representing the object is qualifying.
- each element is provided with a weighting value indicative of its importance or precedence, said weighting value modifying the priority value in accordance with the comparison state of said element.
- the present invention provides a system for comparing properties of objects wherein said objects are defined by an array of elements describing a decision process, each element containing data related to a particular property or properties of its associated object and a rule or rules for comparison of the property with related properties in another object, the system including means for comparing associated properties within said objects according to said rule or rules provided by each element and means for allocating a priority value to said object indicating the state of the comparison of each property, said priority value being indicative of whether the object has disqualified by an unsuccessful comparison, qualified or still qualifying.
- Figure 1 shows a diagrammatic representation of a simple two object application of the invention
- Figure 2 shows a diagrammatic representation of the qualification process of the invention
- Figure 3 shows a diagrammatic representation of a simple template used for initialising an object
- Figure 4 shows a diagrammatic representation of association between the elements of each object in the application of Figure 1 ;
- Figure 5 shows a diagrammatic representation of the initialised states of the two objects of the application of Figure 1 ;
- Figure 6 shows a table of the product object qualification and priority values
- Figure 7 shows a table of the decision array associated with the product object of Figure 6;
- Figure 8 shows a diagrammatic representation of the seller and buyer screens of a bid/offer application using the invention
- Figure 9 shows a diagrammatic representation of buyer side application space of the application of Figure 8;
- Figure 10 shows a diagrammatic representation of the beef side element attached to its decision array (cube);
- Figure 1 1 shows a diagrammatic representation of seller side application space of the application of Figure 8.
- Figure 1 2 shows a diagrammatic representation of the interaction between the buyer and seller side application spaces of the application of Figure 8.
- the consumer object is communicating with the product object and visa-versa.
- the consumer can be considered the client process, and the product the server process.
- the consumer provides an interface mechanism to negotiate with the product object. Any changes to the consumer by an external client, such as a user interface, or other external process, are handled by the consumer. This ensures that any changes in state are directed to the appropriate processing in the product object.
- this client server relationship can be repeated ad infinitum.
- One consumer can have, and usually does many products associated with it. Also one product may have many consumers associated with it, this depends on the application.
- one product may act as a client to many consumers, in the case of the product being the client, and the consumer being the server. This is demonstrated in Figures 8, 9 and 1 1 , where bid and offer objects are acting as both a client and a server.
- the function of invention is to provide meaningful results to a decision process. It does this by the product object firing events on changes to its state of qualification. There are three states of qualification. • Qualified
- the product object has a priority.
- the priority indicates how qualified an item actually is. Normally, though not necessarily when a product object is fully qualified its priority is 0. As it becomes less qualified, its priority increases. There may be occasions when there is a requirement to determine when a product object is more than fully qualified, in which case, the priority is able to go negative if the product object is instructed to allow it. This is not the normal case however, as the primary function of the priority is to indicate how near to qualified a qualifying item is. There may also be a reason to indicate how disqualified a product object is. To enable this, the priority continues to change even after the product disqualifies. This ability is also optional.
- Figure 2 shows the product objects qualification process.
- the product object's qualification and priority may vary.
- the qualification is varied by the decision structure within the product object, and the priority is varied by the precedence of elements within the product object, depending on their qualification state. Qualification may also be decided purely on priority.
- the qualification process occurs within the product object. It is determined by what we refer to as a decision array. This array is typically a multi dimensional array of product elements. Each of these elements has a qualification. The qualification is determined by the item state and optionally also by the items child states in relation to items in the consumer object.
- the product object needs to be initialised. This initialisation can occur in one of two ways. It is either initialised by an external template, or as a subset of a parent product object.
- the external template can be supplied via any means.
- the containing process is responsible for retrieving the template from its archive and initialising the product object from the template data. For this embodiment, it will be assumed all external template data arrives from a database somewhere in the form of a data set.
- the template as a data set consists of a number of records. Each record describes a single element that is part of the product objects decision array. Typically there are many elements in a decision array. Each template record may contain at least the following details, however, it will be appreciated that the type and function of records can be varied to suit the particular application:
- Each template record goes towards creating an element in the decision array.
- An example of a simple decision array is the array for a simple comparison of financial products on an Internet based comparison site.
- the template shown in Figure 3 illustrates a simple decision array.
- the array is referred to as a cube in the figures. Its only two dimensional, and has in total, only seven elements.
- the consumer object is the interface between the external process and the qualifying product objects. It consists of the same type of template that can make up a product object.
- the consumer object may or may not have elements associated with any particular product object. In this example it does.
- the consumer object template is identical to the product object template, and each element in the consumer object is associated with its related element in the product object. The consumer maintains a list identifying this relationship. This is association shown in Figure 5.
- the consumer object is able to communicate changes to the consumer object to the related element in the product object.
- An example of a scenario, which may occur with this template is as follows.
- the product object has been initialised, and the consumer object has been initialised, in this case both from the same template (some of the fields used to initialise the consumer object are not necessary for the initialisation of the consumer object).
- Masking occurs to both the product object and the consumer object. It may or may not be part of the initialisation process. In the case of the product, it usually is, and in the case of the consumer, it sometimes is.
- Masking completes the initialisation of a decision object by setting its initial state.
- the product object is attached to a product which has only four available repayment periods - daily, weekly, two-weekly and monthly.
- the process needs to set the selection of the other three objects from the external process.
- the external initialisation process needs to mask out the related records in the product object, that is the quarterly, semi-annual and annual repayment options. These are not available to that product.
- the external process sets the selection of these items to false.
- the consumer object needs no masking during initialisation. Any consumer object masking at initialisation is in regard to setting the defaults. In this case the default is all repayment periods are selected.
- ticks represent items, which are selected, and the crosses represent items, which have been masked.
- the initialisation has also caused the product object to calculate the initial qualification of each of its elements, and also the priority and qualification of the product object.
- the mechanism for doing this is explained in the following section named qualifying.
- the initialisation process has left the two objects in the state shown in Figure 5.
- the product object has also initialised a lot of variables behind the scenes, which are intrinsic to the operation of the mechanism.
- the tables of Figures 6 and 7 show the detail of the state of each element.
- Qualifying involves the consumer object being changed by some external process, for example, a user interacting with a user interface, which in turn sets the selection of an item in the consumer object.
- a user interacting with a user interface, which in turn sets the selection of an item in the consumer object.
- This is the same mechanism that the product object uses at initialisation time to perform masking - in fact it is the same process, except the user interface is masking elements in the consumer object, instead of the initialisation routines.
- the product object After initialisation the product object is in a qualifying state, that is not fully qualified and not disqualified.
- the priority is at 28 which means it is some way off fully qualified, as three of the most important elements (those with the highest precedence) are disqualified. Now say, for example, the consumer object has its annual selection changed. In this scenario, this has happened because the user has specified that he or she does not need annual repayments.
- the set selection method in the consumer object receives a notification telling it to change the annual selection from true to false. This it does, then checks its products associated list to find any product elements associated with it. It finds only one - the annual element in the one and only product object. The consumer object then sends a notification to the product object telling it to requalify its annual element against the new consumer profile.
- the product object receives the notification, telling it to requalify its annual element against the new consumer state. This requalification occurs in two stages.
- Qualifying the element itself occurs as follows.
- the product object compares the element to its related element in the consumer object, in the manner specified by the elements rules.
- the operand specifies the comparison is to be done by comparing the selection of the product object element to the selection of the consumer object element.
- Stage 2 Qualify the parent.
- the change in the qualification of one of the children in the hierarchy involves this routine in the parent. It is now necessary to examine the qualification of all the child items in relation to their relative consumer items and apply the parent qualification logic to them in the manner specified by the product object's parent element - the 'repayment period' element in the example given.
- This process is repeated when the user selects any other item of the children until one of two things happen. Either the user deselects both the quarterly and semi-annual elements, or the user deselects all elements.
- the user deselects the semi-annual and quarterly elements. This causes the parent to become qualified.
- the change from qualifying to qualified causes the parent elements precedence to be subtracted from the product objects priority. This causes the priority to become 0, indicating the product object has now become qualified.
- Stage 2 of the process is iterated up the tree structure by performing it for the parent element's parent, until there is either no parent, or no change to the parent's qualification. In this instance, because the parent is the root element, it has no parent so iteration stops at one level.
- the setting, of the qualification in the root element can be used to set the qualification of the product object, rather than the priority becoming less than 1 .
- Case 2 The user deselects all elements. With the current operator, this causes the product object disqualify, because all elements in the decision array have disqualified.
- Another example of an application of the invention is a negotiation process between seller and buyer.
- the shipment consists of a number of lots.
- the shipment is made up of four components, the shipment and the three lots being offered.
- the producer has a package they wish to sell. It does not match either of the client's requirements, and the price being bid does not meet the supplier's offer. He wishes to offer the bidders a slightly different package, in the hope of making a sale at an acceptable price to one or more of them.
- the beef, veal and lamb arrays may be, though not necessarily logical objects, consisting of a pointer to the relative node in product object array. Now we have these arrays they are attached to their relevant objects within the application. In this scenario, we assume the user interface for the application looks like that shown in Figure 8.
- the underlying application structure when separated it from its user interface and its communication mechanisms can be simplified for the purposes of demonstration to a buyer communicating with a seller.
- Each of these objects is attached to a data set, which gives further information about the item we are dealing with.
- the decision system of the invention controls the state of this object, by separating any decision-related properties from the rest of the data.
- the beef array is associated to it as shown in
- the underlying seller side application space is almost identical to the supplier side processing for the purposes of negotiation. There are only really two differences - the seller has a buyer list to hold a reference to each buyer's session and the seller's consumer object is attached to the buyer's offer object.
- the seller's buyer list contains only one object referring to the single bid object which is controlled by the one and only negotiating buyer.
- the seller's consumer object allows him or her to make offers to the one and only buyer's product offer object.
- Figure 1 2 demonstrates a complex scenario which allows multiple sellers to offer to multiple clients, and multiple clients to bid with multiple sellers.
- a decision logic array which can be attached to any or all objects involved in the negotiation process. Manipulation of the decision arrays will now be described.
- This application there are two consumer object decision arrays which manipulate two physical product object decision arrays each.
- Each physical product arrays has three child product arrays, which are manipulated as the parent is manipulated.
- the buyer and the seller have a consumer array each. This allows the buyer to manipulate the two bid arrays (which are analogous to the product objects previously referred to) through it (one on the buyer's machine, and one on the sellers machine). The seller is able to maintain the two offer arrays via his or her consumer array.
- this manipulation take the case of the seller wishing to offer buyer the shipment without the beef component. He or she deselects the beef component in his consumer array.
- the consumer array communicates with the two product arrays associated to it, telling each of them to requalify themselves according to the new consumer profile.
- the product arrays perform the qualification process as described above, and each of the arrays sends a message, which is detected by their relative user interfaces. In response to this message, the interfaces update their appearances to reflect the new state of their product arrays - so the buyer's and seller's offer screens change.
Abstract
Description
Claims
Priority Applications (2)
Application Number | Priority Date | Filing Date | Title |
---|---|---|---|
EP99970763A EP1121660A4 (en) | 1998-10-15 | 1999-10-15 | Decision platform for object comparison |
AU11390/00A AU755756B2 (en) | 1998-10-15 | 1999-10-15 | Decision platform for object comparison |
Applications Claiming Priority (2)
Application Number | Priority Date | Filing Date | Title |
---|---|---|---|
AUPP6505 | 1998-10-15 | ||
AUPP6505A AUPP650598A0 (en) | 1998-10-15 | 1998-10-15 | This 'n' that |
Publications (1)
Publication Number | Publication Date |
---|---|
WO2000023922A1 true WO2000023922A1 (en) | 2000-04-27 |
Family
ID=3810726
Family Applications (1)
Application Number | Title | Priority Date | Filing Date |
---|---|---|---|
PCT/AU1999/000893 WO2000023922A1 (en) | 1998-10-15 | 1999-10-15 | Decision platform for object comparison |
Country Status (3)
Country | Link |
---|---|
EP (1) | EP1121660A4 (en) |
AU (1) | AUPP650598A0 (en) |
WO (1) | WO2000023922A1 (en) |
Citations (4)
Publication number | Priority date | Publication date | Assignee | Title |
---|---|---|---|---|
WO1997037315A1 (en) * | 1996-03-29 | 1997-10-09 | Onsale, Inc. | Method and system for processing and transmitting electronic auction information |
EP0828223A2 (en) * | 1996-09-04 | 1998-03-11 | Hitachi, Ltd. | Automatic auction method |
WO1998034187A1 (en) * | 1997-01-30 | 1998-08-06 | Autocom Aps | A method of holding an auction and uses of the method |
WO1998034189A1 (en) * | 1997-01-22 | 1998-08-06 | Flycast Communications Corp. | Internet advertising system |
-
1998
- 1998-10-15 AU AUPP6505A patent/AUPP650598A0/en not_active Abandoned
-
1999
- 1999-10-15 EP EP99970763A patent/EP1121660A4/en not_active Withdrawn
- 1999-10-15 WO PCT/AU1999/000893 patent/WO2000023922A1/en not_active Application Discontinuation
Patent Citations (4)
Publication number | Priority date | Publication date | Assignee | Title |
---|---|---|---|---|
WO1997037315A1 (en) * | 1996-03-29 | 1997-10-09 | Onsale, Inc. | Method and system for processing and transmitting electronic auction information |
EP0828223A2 (en) * | 1996-09-04 | 1998-03-11 | Hitachi, Ltd. | Automatic auction method |
WO1998034189A1 (en) * | 1997-01-22 | 1998-08-06 | Flycast Communications Corp. | Internet advertising system |
WO1998034187A1 (en) * | 1997-01-30 | 1998-08-06 | Autocom Aps | A method of holding an auction and uses of the method |
Non-Patent Citations (1)
Title |
---|
See also references of EP1121660A4 * |
Also Published As
Publication number | Publication date |
---|---|
EP1121660A1 (en) | 2001-08-08 |
AUPP650598A0 (en) | 1998-11-05 |
EP1121660A4 (en) | 2001-11-14 |
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