Content aggregation method and apparatus for on-line purchasing system

Abstract

The method comprises processing plural product information records from the product information sources into one or more groups based on which product information records are likely to correspond to the same product, correlating a unique product ID corresponding to the product associated with each of said groups to identify the product, comparing each identified product to categories of a taxonomy to determine a category for the identified products in the taxonomy, and determining attributes for each categorized product based on the product information records corresponding to each group, creating product specifications based on the determined attributes and storing the product specification in the corresponding determined categories of the taxonomy.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 10 / 659,740 filed Sep. 11, 2003, which is a continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 10 / 119,311, filed Apr. 10, 2002 (U.S. Pat. No. 6,714,933 issued Mar. 30, 2004), which is a continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 09 / 566,734, filed May 9, 2000 (U.S. Pat. No. 6,535,880 issued Mar. 18, 2003), the disclosures of which are incorporate herein by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] 1. Field of the Invention [0003] The invention relates to systems for creating catalogs of goods and services over a communications network. More specifically, the invention is directed to a method and system for aggregating content for an on-line catalog system. [0004] 2. Description of the Related Art [0005] The Internet is a worldwide network of computers linked together by various hardware communication links all running a standard suite of protocols known as TCP / IP (tr...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

First, this requires knowledge of the URLs for each merchant Web site or the use of a search engine which can be cumbersome and inaccurate.

However, the various formats of each merchant Web site render it tedious to compare products and terms directly.

However, since various merchants and other parties having product information records all store information in various data formats and layouts, collection of information for a product catalog is a tedious and labor intensive task requiring a great deal of manual operations.

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