INTELLECT objectives are to enable the suitable representation of products including all practicable variants in electronic commerce systems to achieve the most realistic possible visualisation. Industrial target groups are bicycle manufacturers, suppliers, and wholesalers, and in addition average customers. The conception of the system will be as generalised as possible to facilitate the transfer to other industrial sectors. An additional pilot will be carried out with a distributor of networking products representing the business-to-business scope. User friendliness, simplified access to the service, trust in security and privacy of the service, high quality of information managed and represented, and the use of international standards are the key objectives. Therefore INTELLECT attaches great importance to the involvement of the end users. At the end of he project the system will be ready for after-project commercialisation.

Description of the work:

INTELLECT will analyse, define, and implement an electronic commerce system with virtual reality product representation, on-line configuration of product variants, an Internet on-line help desk, and integrated security and privacy mechanisms. INTELLECT is subdivided into seven phases:

In phase I the user requirements will be analysed, a user group will be established by a kick-off workshop and the state-of-the-art in on-line shop systems, virtual reality development and user-advice and assistance systems will be evaluated. In addition a first market survey will be carried out.

Based on these results phase II will carry out the system modules' conception and will make a decision about the software development environment. First small modules will be produced by the rapid and evolving prototyping method.

Phase III will perform and conclude the implementation of the system and overall integration of the modules. Phase IV starts the integration of the system developed at the users' sites to lead over to the different pilots. The information repository will be populated again by close involvement of the end users.

The partially overlapping phase V will evaluate the system/pilot regarding its usefulness and suitability to the user needs. This will include techno-economic adequacy and cost/benefit analyses as well as usability tests. The first market survey will be extended to a market definition to quantify market targets and to identify economic consequences for possible services to be provided and industrial users.

Phases VI and VII are continuous tasks for dissemination and exploitation, and project management. The INTELLECT project management serves to a successful handling and settlement of all management related responsibilities. The dissemination and exploitation management tasks will be carried out to achieve the planned goals including a promising post-project commercialisation phase.

Milestones and expected results:

The overall INTELLECT result will be an electronic commerce system for products which can be configured on-line in virtual reality. Company's in-house databases, security and privacy demands, a configuration module incl. management of variant dependencies, and an user-friendly assistance module will be integrated. Milestones are the establishment of a user group, the specification and implementation of the system, the conclusion of the pilots, and two international workshops for dissemination.

If interested people want to play with the prototype, a direct link to our INTELLECT server is here available, which you can use. But keep in mind it is only a prototype, what means that we have to go on with the development of further features, embed user requirements, and reach a more stable status as now. Therefore it is current only a beta version, which is maybe sometimes not available online. If you have questions or problems with the handling do not hesitate to contact us direct at info@ist-intellect.com. The following link leads direct to the protoype, which based on a tomcat server, with coccon as XML translater, and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) on the application server. Additionally, an oracle database has been used.

The prototype link: http://itchy.ppc.biba.uni-bremen.de/shop/shop.xml