scenario

Jalopy Jamboree Automotive (JJA) is a small family run business auto parts retailer with 6 locations throughout northern New Mexico. A few years ago they got ambitious and opened their online catalog by purchasing the web retailer services from a leading online portal vendor. Online sales have been a little bit lackluster beause they have been losing out to their larger competitors who have fancier and better funded websites.

The Paganazzi brothers who run the chain after Art, their father passed on have decided that they can get a little more traction (so to speak) with their online market especially to their more rural customers if they offered better online services. Joe (the oldest brother) has enlisted you to pitch a solution to make their online catalog more productive but they aren't able to spend $100k on software.

You have decided that you need to offer more than just a catalog of parts and daily specials. You want to increase customer loyalty by offering higher levels of personalization for users, increase sales with cross and up selling for on parts, and improve service by offering more online diagnostic advice. You've decided to take a look at the fantastic open source project called Aikernel.

activators, contexts, &
concepts, and cells

Obviously this is a pretty big undertaking. The Aikernel should make many of your tasks simpler by decreasing the amount of prescision you have to code in and increasing the opportunities to meet the Paganazzi brother's needs.

Activators are specific pieces of information that get sent to your cell under a certain context.

For example, the a "torque wrench" might be fact that you want to give to your cell as a fact to consider when the user has triggered a context for cross selling. The torque wrench might be what they are shopping for.  Mapping the user's intentions to the activator is what the framework does well. Perhaps they have clicked on a link or they have typed in the work "torque" in the search box. Either way, the resulting action should be that the system will display the product page for the torque wrenches and offer some up and cross selling opprtunities based on what your cell finds in its retail part database.

This is an example of how you might define the cells, contexts, concepts, and activators for this solution.

module customizations

The aikernel in its current version does not currently offer Tomcat or other web container integrations. To pull off this recipe as descripted for the Paganazzi brothers you would need to customize the following modules:

deployments

Deploying the solution would entail installing the SDK on the server and doing your integration with your web server (Tomcat, or otherwise).

alternatives

Here are some alternatives or additions that you should consider:

1. Integrate with a voice server from IBM, Microsoft, Dialog, etc to offer phone based customer service on orders. Use the natural language services to offer after hours or on hold dialogs with the customers.

2. Skip the Tomcat integration with its module customizations and offer a Java based interaction with the user based strictly on natural language.