Professional Masters Degree Dissertation Proposal Report about computers technology

Professional Masters Degree Dissertation Proposal Report (Report of the Literature Review and Selection) TITLE OF THE THESIS The Design and Implementation of an Online Bookstore Based on ASP.net and Collaborative filtering Technology GRADUATE SCHOOL Computer and Information Engineering School GRADUATE MAJOR Computer Technology RESEARCH DIRECTION Web Application GRADUATE NAME Ireri, Elizaphan Njiru SUPERVISOR Professor Cai BEIJING TECHNOLOGY AND BUSINESS UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL Date September 2017 Instructions Opening Report will use A4 paper printing, left-bound. Graduate students should carefully fill in each column where applicable. When there is insufficient space, please add their own page. After opening report is adopted by the Faculty review, hold open opening report reply. Replying experts should be at least 3-5, Associate Professor and above titles of specialist or postgraduate tutor, including at least 2 practical experts in the field, members identified by the Institute, the academic degree Evaluation Committee. Answers by the expert group to review it and give results for Graduate record. Postgraduates should read well for the topic in the related field of foreign materials, references shall not be less than 20 articles in number, foreign documents not less than 5. Opening report shall be completed by the graduate student, after the title is adopted by the College. References description will be written as follows If it is a journal of literature, its format is number author. Article topics. Journal name, year, volume number, issue number (if the journals without volume number are year, issue number), page numbers. documents are books, format number author. The title. Place of publication Publisher, year published. Opening Report, the total number of words of the masters thesis is generally not more than 10000 words, literature review part 3000-5000, part of the research programme 3000-5000. Globally, the electronic commerce, or e-commerce market is worth around 22.1 trillion, according to latest UNCTAD estimates, (The Economic Times, 2017).In the beginning, e-commerce was an American phenomenon, but as the internet has expanded across the globe, it is now China that boasts the worlds largest e-commerce market, both in terms of sales and in number of online shoppers, followed by the US and Japan.The Alibaba empire founded by Jack Ma had the largest public offering in history, at 25 billion in 2015 (AltusHost Blog, 2017). E-Commerce improves efficiency and effectiveness of businesses, governments and not-for-profit agencies. The technologies used in e-commerce also lower the cost of production and distribution of goods and services. Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser. Online shopping has become an increasingly a common essential of life in the 21st Century. Its popularity can be credited to the fact that convenience is highly valued in our world today. Shopping online offers the opportunity to buy any product you need while on a flight or getting ready for bed. Online customers must have access to the Internet and a valid method of payment in order to complete a transaction. The largest of these online retailing corporations are Alibaba, Amazon, and eBay. Michael Aldrich, pioneered online shopping in the 1980s, and turned everything around when he launched a system which allowed consumers, customers, agents, distributors, suppliers and service companies to be connected on-line to the corporate systems and allow business transactions to be completed electronically in real-time. In 1990, the first World Wide Web server and browser, created by Tim Berners-Lee and opened for commercial use in 1991. After that, Amazon.com launched its online shopping site in 1995 and eBay was also introduced in 1995. In 1999, Jack Mafounded the website Alibaba.com, a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. Alibaba later launched sites Taobao and Tmall in 2003 and 2008, respectively. Today, we dont even require a desktop computer or laptop to do our online shopping anymore, just a mobile device with an App or Browser. We can find nearly every product wholesale or retail available, at the cheapest prices and we can do so from any location without worrying about going to the store. No wonder online shopping is still one of the fastest growing industries in the world. Depending on the types of commodities, different kinds of shopping systems have been developed to automate the shopping process by assisting customers to have commodity information retrieval and comparison in the massive information environment of the Internet. For the various types of commodities that customers buy often, such as food, clothes and books, a shopping system can be developed to acquire a customers personal preferences by analyzing his/her profile information and purchasing records (Lee. J., Podlaseck. M., Schonberg. E., Hoch. R. 2001). In the recent past with the increase in the use of internet and e- commerce, book purchases through online shopping has also increased. Online bookstores have thrived and changed customer behavior in these years. An online bookstore is a virtual store where customers can browse the catalog and select books if interest. The online bookstore website provides the customer with an interface where the customer will create/sign in to his account. Then the customer will select books from the site, the selected books are collected in a shopping cart and the shopping cart is presented as an order. Usually the customer will be asked to select or fill some shipping details on his/her addresses, shipping option and payment information. The items in the shopping cart will be purchased and shipped using the provided shipping information. An email notification will be sent to the customer as soon as the order is placed. There has seen great development in Online Bookstores as portals for book sales. In 1992Charles M. StackfoundedBook Stacks Unlimited,an online bookstore selling new physical books, (J. Norman, 2017). This was the first online bookstore idea to be initiated. Stacks Bookstore began as a dial-up bulletin board located inCleveland, Ohio.It moved to the Internet asBooks.com, eventually attracting a half million visitors each month. Offering 500, 000 titles, Book Stacks had 35 staffers who gave their book recommendations to visitors. Other features included a daily literary journal, summaries of new books, RealAudio interviews with authors and forums in which customers could ask questions and discuss books. books could be searched by title, author subject, keyword or ISBN. Stack didnt anticipate the excitement it would generate in the financial community. Instead, he sold the business in 1996 for 4.2 million to Cendant Corp. Subsequently, books.com was purchased by Barnes Noble and the address redirects to HYPERLINK http//www.barnesandnoble.com www.barnesandnoble.com. In 1995, Amazon.com went online and in subsequent years became the leader in the online books business. Other best performing online bookstores other than Amazon and Barnes Noble include but not limited to Powells Books, Books-A-Million, Alibris, AbeBooks, Biblio.com, Tattered Cover, VaroleBooks, Better World Books, and the list is long. 1.2 Current Status Online bookstores have become popular since the late 1990s, with Amazon.com currently taking the lead. The Amazon companys phenomenal growth is due in part to its technological innovation. From Amazon1-Click, which dramatically speeds up the ordering process, toRecommendations, which determines customers interests by examining their previous purchases and rated items, Amazon has been focusing on making the online shopping experience as seamless as possible. The significant increase in popularity of online bookstores over the last decade has had an immense impact on offline bookstores, covering all aspects of their business. Online bookstores offer a number of advantages over physical stores these physical stores have tried to counteract these advantages by capitalizing on areas in which online stores are unable to compete. Two of the main advantages of online bookstores are Convenience and variety. From the comfort of a consumers home, one is free to browse selections of thousands of books from a variety of sources. It is also extremely easy to compare directly prices from different retailers to find the best deals. These online bookstores maintain various features that help users select books. Their websites are interactive and far more advanced than online library catalogs. Users can post their reviews with a rating and those customer reviews became important book selection guide for new buyers. Readers can also post their opinions about the book and feel participating in the assessment of books. The website also traces and analyzes users every step of search, and presents similar books of interests. Customers can see the inside of some of the books listed. They can see the table of contents, book covers, indexes, and some pages. A trend which has impacted upon both online and physical bookstores is the increasing popularity of e-books and e-readers. Users can either purchase books instantly from the e-reader itself or from the retailers own website. The e-book is then automatically downloaded the next time the users device is connected to the internet. Whilst browsing selections of books has been quick and easy for a number of years online, the only way to find, purchase and read a book instantaneously has been in a physical store. However, the advent of e-readers has also made this entire process almost instantaneous from anywhere with an internet connection. This further adds to the convenience for the consumer, impacting upon the appeal of physical bookstores. Online bookstores and e-readers have had a monumental impact on offline stores. The focus of physical stores has shifted as a result of the increased necessity to attract customers against the backdrop of quick and convenient online shopping. However, the advancements of the internet over the last decade can, and have been embraced by physical bookstores. The fact that many stores now stock e-readers perhaps indicates that a symbiotic relationship can exist between both online/offline bookstores, as well as physical/electronic books. Many online bookstores provide advanced search functions on their websites, allowing the consumer to search for specific authors or publishers. The majority of printed books are assigned an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) which is also be used to search online not only for a specific book but also a specific edition of the book. Physical bookstores usually categorize books alphabetically, making searching for numerous books by the same author quick and convenient also. The aesthetic of a front cover of a book is also important in physical stores. For instance, as more novel books are adapted to feature films, many publishers release editions of the corresponding book with film-like covers, featuring images of settings and well-known Hollywood stars from the film. Whilst these editions are just as readily available online as offline, their covers are commonly made prominent in physical bookstores, in the hope that consumers are attracted to the designs and thus drawn to these books. 1.3 Development Trend of Engineering Analysis The exponentially increasing information along with the rapid expansion of the online websites (bookstores) causes the problem of information overload, (Zeming Z, 2009). This makes customers to spend too much time flooding retail shops on the websites to know about the books and to survey the relevant book information for further comparison. To overcome this problem is to develop intelligent shopping systems that provide personalized information services. The system can interact with customers and capture what they need, thus provide suitable suggestions or recommendations and good decision support for them to buy online. Recommendation systems have evolved as intelligent systems which can generate results in form of recommendations to the users. They reduce the overheads associated with making best choices among the plenty of choices. They provide benefit to both the consumer and the manufacturer by suggesting products to consumers which cant be demanded until the recommendations. Most of the current online bookstores use content based filtering techniques. Content based filtering techniques match items to users using classifier based approaches or nearest neighbor methods. In classifier based approaches each user is associated with a classifier as a profile. They analyze the similarity between books based on their contents and recommend similar items based on users previous preferences. Collaborative filtering, collects opinions from customers in the form of ratings on items, services or service providers, Amazon uses this technique. Content based filtering cannot find out the quality of the item thus to overcome this problem collaborative filtering system is used, (Sushama R. and Darshana B, 2015). It is from this information on online bookstores that my research interest is based. I seek to address the design and implementation of an online bookstore that uses collaborative filtering to recommend books to customers. The system will be based on ASP.net, using PHP and MySQL. The system will focus more on the books recommendation technology. Recommendation systems generate results based on ratings of the books by users and an optimum book recommendation system will recommend books to the buyers that suits their interests. An online book store has a front end and a back end the front end provides customer interaction with the system while the back end is the administrators interface. A customer can, create, sign in to his account, place items into a shopping cart and purchase using his credit card details. The Administrator will have additional functionalities when compared to the common user. He can add, delete and update the book details, book categories, member information and also confirm a placed order. SELECTION REPORT THE MAIN CONTENT OF THE REPORT (Not Less than 3000 words) The Purpose and Significance of the Project The Main Content and Focus of this Project R30Xl
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