1
Ontology based Retail Shopping Point using
pervasive computing
Muhammad Tariq Khan, Vinod Kumar
Pakistan Air Force - Karachi Institute of Economics and Technology (PAF-KIET)
sun.developer@hotmail.com, vinod_rughani@hotmail.com
Abstract—Mobile is gaining popularity as a shopping tool.
The pendulum is shifting from e-commerce to m-commerce. In
under-developed and developed countries, mobile industry is
one of the fastest glowing star. Taking the case of Pakistan for
example, currently more than 76 million people are using mobile
phones. In spite of this success, there are many doors of
improvement and research is still open.
A big number of population in the world comprises of lower
and middle class employed families. It’s hard for such employed
person to take out time for shopping and other activities because
of their variant job timings. This directly affects health,
performance and indirectly affects overall personal life. Current
approaches in the field of mobile retail shopping talks about
problems like mismanagement of supply chain process in retail
grocery, lack of user friendly and effective mobile applications
in pervasive retail and untrusted transaction environment in
ubiquitous computing.
This paper proposes an ontology based model for retail
industry. For experimental purpose Grocery Retail is our area
of interest. Our focus is to facilitate a common man and to free
him from the hassle going to different shops for purchasing
different products. Buyers would have the power to investigate
about the different products offered by different retailers, can
compare prices and post comments anywhere anytime. Our
model will not only be helpful in creating a healthy competition
among different retailers but also in controlling price where
price control is an issue.
Index Terms— Grocery, Ontology, Pervasive Retail, Semantic
Web.
I. INTRODUCTION
T he success and failure of local and international business
can be determined by adoption and properly utilization of
emerging technologies. The formulation of effective business
strategy and selection of suitable technology can turn the
problems into opportunities. Online shopping is one of the
widely used channel for shopping. Convenience is the main
reason that people choose online shopping according to the
investigation.
Pakistan is far behind in the area of online shopping. The
use of mobile phone and internet in Pakistan still need
maturity. We must learn to fully exploit the technology with
its true sense. There are many problems which can be reduced
or eliminated, if we involve technology as a solution. In the
field of grocery shopping, we don’t find any online service
which provides services to the consumer. Such services will
be greatly appreciated by the consumer especially those who
have variant job timings and who work out of town.
Inflation is one of the biggest problems in Pakistan.
Commodity prices are on high rise which is creating
dissatisfactory environment for the consumer. The purchasing
power of the consumer is getting weaker and weaker every
day. Majority of Pakistani population consists of middle class
employed families and this category suffers the most. Above
that, retailers and wholesalers do not follow the standard rates
set by the government, and responsible authorities also not
acting to strictly implement the price control policy.
Information disconnection is another major problem. There
is a lack of central information service where consumers can
easily access the information about different products,
compare rates and check the availability. Besides information
disconnection, we also have relationship gap between buyer
and seller.
In this paper we are proposing an ontology based model for
grocery retail. We are also introducing a service that will
integrate different retailers an invite them to market their
products or services through this platform. This would work
as an intermediary catalyst which will try to build a strong
business relationship between retailers and consumers. This
can play a vital role in reducing the information gap between
both parties. The competition will increase among retailers
and this can be effective in solving the problems like inflation
and price control.
II. RELATED WORK
Sangeetha et al. [1] developed an application named
iGROCER. iGROCER is an smart shopping assistant which
not only help the user to shop healthy, but also brings a
positive change in the life of elders, visually impaired and
disable people. It even involves children in weekly grocery
shopping experience. iGROCER also helps in searching out
the shortest with a map indicating the location of the next
item. Some of the features of iGROCER application includes
nutition profile, shopping list, quick shopping and expense
history.
George et al. [2] discussed the rationale for the
development of MyGrocer. This paper focuses on the
Published in 8th National Conference – SZABIST

advancement of the technological infrastructure in the filed of
pervasive retail. They talked about the effective supply chain
management with technological support that has made supply
chain management within the grocery industry more
successful. They ensured that the success factor of the grocery
industry would heavily depend on the effective management
of supply chain.
Guoling et al. [3] talks about formation of business strategy
and how electronic commerce can affect the business
performance. This paper discusses the online retail industry
of china. To properly study the consumer behavior, tracking
the sales status and applying the effective technology can help
you win the competitive race.
Panos et al. [4] revealed some concealed inefficiencies that
existed in the process of supply chain especially those of Fast
Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG). Come of the
inefficiencies were frequent change over, instable production
plan, high out of stock, lack of communication and lost of
sale. MyGrocer business and technological framework is the
solution of the above mentioned problem set.
George Roussos et al. [5] discussed the consumer
perception of the MyGrocer. This paper tries to change the
perception of a common consumer for the shopping. They
emphasized on the transformation of the grocery shopping
into retail entertainment. Such a system would requires the
expertise of professionals of diverse background which
includes interactivity designers, information system
engineers, hardware & application developers, marketing
strategists, product development teams, social scientists and
retail professionals.
Florian Resatsh et al. [6] explains about a Mobile Sales
Assistant (MSA) application which helps retailers and
customer to check the availability of desired product with any
NFC enabled mobile at the point of sale. NFC tags are
attached to the every product and each tag contains a unique
Electronic Product Code (EPC) to identify that product. MSA
sends a request to the server which is connected to an ERP
system. ERP system responds with the details of the product.
MSA not only reduce the quality of service process but also
helps in reduction of the stress factor which influences
consumer positively and this is directly proportional to
increase of purchases.
Robert Steele and Will Tao [7] talks about the application
of MobiPass [10] architecture to the retail industry based on
the Assael’s 5 stages of retail process to enhance shopping
experience. MobiPass architecture helps its service users to
create a trusted platform and to interact with each other
(consumer and retailer) regardless of the whether they have
prior knowledge of each other or not.
Erica et al. [8] examines the use of PDA in the grocery
store. In this paper author discussed the process of designing
of a wireless application for retail shopping specifically for
grocer shopping. First they studied the shopping behavior,
next they evaluated and worked on the designing of the
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prototype and finally perform usability tests.
Jusy scott et al. [9] talks about the issues and tradeoffs of
the fulfillment of the grocery orders. Authors presented an e-
grocery order allocation model that addresses some of these
issues. Study suggests that order fulfillment from distribution
centers is more suitable and efficient than fulfillment from
stores.
III. SEMANTIC WEB AND PERVASIVE RETAIL
The vision of Semantic Web[11] has gained a lot of
popularity in recent times. In spite of the fact that the
adoption of semantic web is slow but, a lot of research has
been done and still going on which shows its stability and
adoptability in near future. International business giants are
appreciating the solutions like MyGROCER[4],
iGROCER[1], and MobiPass[10].Ontology is the basis of
Semantic Web. From the philosophical point of view, the
term ONTOLOGY refers to the study of being. But in the
context of Knowledge Management, ontology defines a
knowledge model to share information in a specific domain.
It is a common vocabulary which can be reused and also
understandable to Software Agents.
Why we use Ontology? Following are some of the reasons
 Common understanding among human and
software agents
Ontology provides a uniform environment where there is least
gap of understanding between human and software agents.
For Example, there are many financial websites which
contain information about financial services and offers. There
are many standard terms which have the common
understanding in all financial institutes. If we publish
ontology of all the common terms, their meaning and
relations with other terms, then computer agents can easily
extract and present the information according to the human
understanding.
 Reuse of domain knowledge
Reusing already defined domain ontology can be helpful for
those companies who are new startups and they can save
valuable amount of time, cost and effort. Effective reuse is
inversely proportional to development effort, cost, time and
performance issues.
 Separation of domain knowledge from operational
knowledge
Domain knowledge represents structural information about
the domain and it can define in terms of classes, properties
and instances.
Then concept of anywhere anytime computing is very
much appreciated in consumer world. Pervasive shopping
offers several advantages to the consumer world like
convenience and time saving which encourages the consumer
to adopt pervasive shopping technologies. IBM was first to
introduce pervasive computing in the context of retail [15].
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IV. GROCERY ONTOLOGY MODEL
In this section we present an ontology model based on
grocery domain for pervasive computing environment. An
ontology model is the structural organization of the
conceptual knowledge which uses object oriented approach.
According to Guarino[12], ontology ca be divided in different
sub-ontologies like upper or top level ontology, domain
ontology, task ontology and application ontology. Upper
ontology defines the most generic and abstract concepts of the
application domain. Some of the existing upper ontologies are
OpenCyc[13] and SUMO[14]. Domain ontology defines core
concepts and relation among the concepts of application
domain (e.g grocery, sports, medical). Task ontology talks
about the usage of the domain ontology. Application ontology
combines, integrates and extends all sub-ontologies for the
application.
Fig-1 Partial Grocery ontology
In fig-1, the upper domain ontology presents a set of
abstract entities each describing a conceptual object including
frozen, diary, paper and plastics and ingredient. This
ontology model is flexible enough to accommodate new
concepts that are required for the domain using taxonomic
hierarchy.
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V. HOME GROCERY SERVICE ARCHITECTURE - CONCEPTUAL
MODEL
We are presenting architecture for pervasive retail based on
grocery ontology model. This conceptual framework is the
basis of our service architecture. This service architecture
presents a business model that is technology centric and
adoptable. Any third party business entity can adopt this
model. The basis of out architecture is ontology based
information structure which is easily extendable according to
the business need. Considering the current socio-economic
condition of the Pakistan, this business model will be an
innovative and cost effective model for the business
community and will benefit consumer and retail industry.
1.1 Customer registers himself using web or mobile.
Registered customer then places an order. He browses the
product information. He picks up the required item from
the product list, enters each product required quantity
and clicks start transaction button. On the other hand, if
customer is using mobile phone, he/she can use the
Messaging Service for order placement. Every customer
is provided a complete list of products code. Customer
will type the product code and quantity and send it to the
company specialized number. The company server
notifies the user about the successful reception of the
order message and starts transaction.
1.2 After receiving the order request, server displays an alert
to the Customer Service Agent (CSA). CSA carefully
checks the order. If found any mistake, CSA is
responsible to validate the order information with the
customer.
1.3 After successful validation, CSA collects all the related
orders’ lists and assigns the collection and delivery job to
the delivery team.
1.4 Delivery team collects each item from the warehouse. It
is important to note that item collection from warehouse
than store not only relieves store congestion and
improves product selection but also saves valuable
amount of time.
1.5 Now its time to pack each order carefully. Customer ID is
attached to each pack which uniquely identifies each
package.
1.6 For delivery, CSA instructs the delivery team about the
route selection. If customers are located at far locations
then CSA decides how to deliver products based on the
customer requirements and delivery type like urgent or
normal delivery.
1.7 Delivery team delivers the order to each client.
1.8 At the time of delivery, delivery man informs the
company about the successful delivery.
1.9 The company server confirms to the customer about the
successful delivery via message. Customer replies back
about the confirmation status.
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Fig. II. The Home Gricery Service Architecture
2.0 Server deducts the total amount and service charges from
the customer current balance.
2.1 Server sends an email and message to inform customer
about the deduction of amount, current balance and order
status.
VI. BENEFITS
We presented an ontology based information integration
model for retail industry. This platform is a trust building
platform between consumer and retailers. Retailers can study
the buying behavior of the consumers and formulate their
strategy accordingly. On the other hand consumer can get all
the required information about grocery products, their prices,
discount offers and retailer’s rating anytime anywhere.
Consumer can also check the retailer’s rating and past
experience of the consumers. The rating criteria would be
based on product availability, consumer satisfaction level,
discount offers and product range.
Our model presents a clear picture to both the parties. Our
model can easily be extended by any grocery business and can
gain high profit. Senior citizen and disable persons can rake
full advantage of our service. They are no more dependent on
anyone for shopping. They can easily place orders and make
payments while enjoying tea in drawing room.
This model can play a vital role in price control. In many
countries, price control as a big issue. Consumers have to pay
more than standard price. This directly affects consumer’s
overall budget and results in increasing inflation. Consumer
will have the power to compare different product’s costs
offered by the different retailers. They can check ratings and
make decision accordingly. They don’t need to go here and
there; they can do this using PDA or Laptop.
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VII. CONCLUSION
In this paper we discussed the inefficiencies that exist within
the grocery retail sector of Pakistan. Consumer has to bear the
burden of problems due to inefficient behavior of the retailers
and ignorant attitude of the responsible government
authorities. We have presented an ontology based solution of
the consumer problems using Home Grocery Service
Architecture (HGSA). This service architecture is a
conceptual framework of a business model which is can be
adopted and implemented as any business entity. This model
can not only generate good amount of revenue but also proven
to be effective solution for the consumer community.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We would like to thank Prof. Khalid Khan, Director
Computer Science department, PAF-KIET, for his support
and encouragement.
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