THE CONCEPT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MARKET

PLACE E-UTILITIES•COM

Jamil Dimassi, Carine Souveyet, Colette Rolland

CRI, Université de Paris 1 Panthèon Sorbonne, 90 rue Tolbiac,75013 Paris, France

Keywords: Market Place, Generic catalogue, e-utilities , Customer-centric, e-Business

Abstract: In order to remain competitive in a deregulated environment, a group of European Utilities developed a

prototype of a single Marketplace called e-utilities

•

com whose mandate is a clear customer centric

orientation in the European environment for a successful mid-term multi-utility business via the Web. This

paper highlights the concept of e-utilities

•

com and its implementation in a Web portal.

1 INTRODUCTION

Many Utilities nowadays find themselves facing the

most challenging market conditions that they have

ever experienced. Deregulation is creating a new

business environment, one that requires utilities to

be transformed from product-oriented to customer-

oriented business entities (E-utilities, 2000). A group

of European Utilities within the European project, e-

utilities aimed at developing solutions and platforms

that will enable utilities to provide the European

consumer with better, more cost effective services.

and products, in a flexible and dynamically adaptive

manner.

The such a context, the project consortium

develop the idea of a single Marketplace called e-

utilities

•

com whose mandate is a clear customer

centric orientation in the European environment. E-

utilities

•

com develops the concept of strategy fit to

identify market opportunities for a successful mid-

term multi-utility business via the Web. The strategy

intent of the e-utilities

•

com is to be unique for the

customer, which is seen in both consumers and

utilities. process.

The belief is that the concept should provide

competitive advantages to both customer groups and

utilities that would give to e-utilities

•

com a

sustainable position in the market. The main benefits

for consumers provided by e-utilities

•

com are in the

field of wider choice of value-based prices, of

customised multi-utility products and of services.

Quality of product and services is seen as a major

requirement by the e-utilities

•

com. For utilities key

issues in attractiveness of e-utilities

•

com are based

on the opportunities for consolidation and efficiency,

customer service and the additional sales channel.

More precisely the Market place should enable :

▪ Consumers

- To manage every step of their utility

provision process in terms of contracting,

metering, billing and payment without

needing any access to any utility front

offices.

- To have one single interaction point with e-

utilities

•

com regarding the services and

products being provided by the utilities that

are members of e-utilities

•

com and their

own information relating to their contract

with e-utilities

•

com.

- To have access to an increased choice of

products and related prices so that they can

customise their requirements to available

products.

- To subscribe and use related services, such

as energy efficiency consulting and white

goods maintenance.

▪ Utilities

- To expand their businesses towards multi-

utility service provision through

participation in packages offered by e-

utilities

•

com

- To analyse patterns of behaviour in the e-

utilities

•

com customer databases and

through such analyses to re-design their

business processes towards more customer-

use oriented products and services.

337

Dimassi J., Souveyet C. and Rolland C. (2004).

THE CONCEPT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MARKET PLACE E-UTILITIESâ

cCOM.

In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 337-347

DOI: 10.5220/0002609503370347

 SciTePress

- To enable them to launch marketing

activities for offering products and services

according to customer segmentations.

- To increase their sale channels

In order to support the e-utilities

•

com concept,

we develop a portal (E-utilities, 2003) comprising a

set of technical components and software tools

working on standard platforms which are surveyed

in this paper.

The paper is mainly organised in two parts as

follows. In section 2, the business model underlying

the e-utilities

•

com is first introduced and the

functional architecture of the portal is outlined.

Thereafter, the components are introduced with a

focus on the VUM/VUS component. VUM/VUS

stands for Virtual Utility Market (VUM) and Virtual

Utility Shop (VUS) respectively. VUM is targeted

towards prospect customers whereas the VUS is

dealing with the customers. In section 3 the key

underlying technologies are presented namely, the

Generic Catalogue of products, services and

associated tariffs of e-utilities

•

com and the

Consumer Profiling facility.

2 E-UTILITIES BUSINESS MODEL

AND ASSOCIATED PORTAL

FUNCTIONALITY

In our point of view, the construction and the use of

a business model in a such type of e-business

projects is important in order to help the designers

and developers in :

- Identifying and understanding the relevant

elements in a specific domain and their

relationships (Ushold, 1995).

- capitalising the domain specific knowledge,

communicating and sharing their

understanding of the business among other

stakeholders (

Sternman, 2000).

- setteling a discussion base that facilitates

the change management in information

systems (

Petrovic, 2001).

- identifying the relevant measures to follow

in an e-business (Pigneur, 2002).

- simulating businesses and learning about

them (

Sternman, 2000).

As introduced in the fisrt section, the aim of e-

utilities• com is to provide to multi-utility European

consumers a single Marketplace. Products and

services of e-utilities•com are offered by a group of

utilities who are members of the •com Marketplace

and may remain ‘transparent’ for the consumer. The

intent of e-utilities•com is to comply with the

consumers’ needs and satisfaction and, from the

utility side, to prospect, to contract and to retain a

customer. Figure 1 highlights the core business

model and the flows, which were set to fulfil this

objective.

When a consumer contacts e-utilities• com

marketing activities will take place to convince

him/her to feel confident subscribing products and

services.

To offer him/her customer centric provisions, e-

utilities•com needs

- To explore consumer’s intention and

interest by capturing consumer’s data

- To get an estimate of the consumer profile

using a customer profiling functionality

and,

- To make a personalise product offering

matching the consumer’s needs with the e-

utilities

•

com products and services.

The e-utilities

•

com is the sole contracting party

either with customers or with utilities as

subcontractor. Participating utilities within e-

utilities

•

com will be enabled to browse the offered

products and services from competitors or other

utilities from other operating areas. Intention of e-

utilities

•

com is to provide transparency to customers

and utilities in all fields of the business, which also

includes a full set of customer account statements.

A third party involvement with core competence

in field of finance is required to handle the

customised billing/payment activities intended in the

business model.

Finally the e-utilities

•

com will be the origin

point for customer servicing, routing customers’

requests to the responsible point for conversion into

customers’ satisfaction.

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338

Figure 2 shows the functional architecture,

which supports the e-utilities

•

com business model.

The Figure shows that six of the e-utilities

•

com

portal functionalities highlighted above namely,

consumer data collection, marketing, product

offering, contracting, billing & payment and

customer servicing are provided by the VUM/VUS

component. However, contracting requires a specific

technical component, the generic workflow engine.

The consumer profiling facilities are dealt with by

the Consumer Profiling component. Figure 2 also

shows that several data repositories are necessary to

support the enactment of these functionalities, the

customer/prospect databases and the catalogue of

products and services. We comment these in turn.

Marketing

Static pages of the portal aim to demonstrate the

benefits provided by the Marketplace, both for

consumers and participating utilities, together with

Market Information, events, price listings, customer

statistics deriving from the Data Mining in the

Customer dB etc.

An interactive demonstrator is being

implemented to promote the portal’s efficiency in

product and package offering, the facilities for

multi-product comparison and outline the option of

creating customised contracts that could include

more than one product from different utilities within

the European Union.

Customer data collection

To facilitate customer data collection the portal

offers either a guided questionnaire for the

inexperienced user or a detailed one for the

experienced user. Information gathered updates the

prospect/customer databases and is used for the

customisation of pages according to the prospect

classification results. The portal also keeps track of

an incomplete questionnaire that a prospect left

unfinished during a visit to the portal.

The information collected in the

prospect/customer databases will constitute not only

one of the incentives for utilities to become

members of the Marketplace, but also a data pool for

data mining and prospect classification experiments.

The resulting information can assist in making more

informed business decisions, both on the

marketplace basis but also for the individual

utilities-members.

Product Offering

Being the key issue of the portal’s attractiveness

to the consumer, this functionality is supported by

the catalogue of products and services available to

contact

billing

consumer

Integrated.COM

company

e-utilities .COM

company

payment

supply

utility

subcontracting

billing

data exchange

contracting

Third

party

payment

data exchange

payment

Figure1: Core Business Model

THE CONCEPT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MARKET PLACE E-UTILITIES•COM

339

the consumer. The catalogue is implemented

dynamically using a generic structure, the generic

catalogue, to support any kind of update of products

and services offered by participating utilities of the

e-utilities

•

com or implied by the integration of a

new participating utility. It allows in a flexible

manner to query and display information available in

the catalogue and supports comparison between

products and services.

All information gathered from the

questionnaires, together with additional information

provided by the user, where needed, is used to

retrieve from the catalogue the most fitting offers for

the customer’s special needs.

The prospect will be offered the opportunity to

view all unitary products and packages that apply to

his situation, but also compare on their price, quality

related standards, contracting restrictions, or

payment options.

All information gathered during this procedure,

plus the results of the consumer selection, will

update the prospect/customer databases for future

use in statistics and customisation of the portal’s

pages.

Contracting

The consulting facility guides the prospect

customer through the selection of the most fitting

products to the personalised establishment of his

contract with the Marketplace. The main issues

introducing the contracting conditions related to the

following points:

a- Customer Identification

After having selected all consumer’s personal

information, a third party will be involved to handle

the financial activities intended in the Marketplace’s

functionality. This third party will also undertake the

role to provide information related to the customer’s

credit score, so that the portal accordingly offers to

the user the relevant contracting options. Completion

of the registration form will conclude in the

assignment of the user’s log in ID.

b- Selection of Billing Party

Offering the consumer more customer-centric

provisions and trying to enhance its flexibility

towards special conditions of any participating

utility, the Marketplace will provide the option to the

customer to select the specific utility and not the

Marketplace as the billing party of the contract. In

such a case, the Marketplace’s role will end at the

contract subscription, whereas all billing, payment

and service activities will be on the utility’s side, out

of the Marketplace’s responsibility.

c- Selection of payment method

Depending on his profile and requirements, the

consumer is able to choose between different

payment methods, via credit card, auto-pay etc. The

third party will support any payment method

selected and update the Marketplace with all

payment or non-payment-related information.

d- Subscription of the Contract

Accordingly to the above, the contract document

consists of the following components:

- Contract Conditions related to the

Marketplace business requirements (static

part).

- Contract Conditions set by the product.

(information and restrictions of the Product

Catalogue).

- Contract Conditions according to the place

of delivery (local laws and geographical

restrictions)

- Contract Conditions set by the supplying

utility.

- Contract Conditions regarding billing and

payment methods.

The actual contract document, resulting from the

above, can be subscribed either on-line, forwarded

as an order to the utility, or by paper, printed for

postal delivery.

Customer servicing

Finally, the Marketplace is the origin point for

customer servicing, routing customer’s requests to

the responsible point. The customer is able to access

all his prior billing and account information, report

problems and submit requests, monitor on-line the

status of the outstanding services and receive

technical support and information from a technical

help line.

Recording all customers’ requests in the

customer database results in an improved

organisation aiming at quicker and customised

processing of customers’ requirements.

ICEIS 2004 - DATABASES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

340

3 UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGIES

3.1 Generic Catalogue and e-

utilities•com catalogue

A number of functionalities of the portal rely on data

stored in the e-utilities

•

com catalogue (E-utilities(c),

2002). The catalogue is the repository of all

products, services and associated tariffs of the

participating utilities of the e-utilities•com

Marketplace. As shown in Figure 3, the catalogue

integrates the data specific to each of the

participating utility in a single structured collection,

which is the catalogue. As for any database, the

collection of data has a structure, which is called the

catalogue model (E-utilities(a), 2002).

As Figure 3 shows there is one catalogue model,

which is instantiated as many times as e-

utilities

•

com comprises participating utilities. Each

instantiation provides the actual data about the

products, services and tariffs of a specific utility. As

an example, one instance corresponds to the tariffs,

products and services of PPC and other instance

provides the data about the services, products and

tariffs of RWE.

Towards genericity of the catalogue model

The salient characteristic of the catalogue model

is its genericity. The model is generic in the sense

that it abstracts from the differences in structuring

products and services of the different participating

utilities of the Marketplace. It also abstracts from the

different tariffs structures that the different members

utilities of as e-utilities

•

com might have.

As an example let us consider the PPC tariff

strategy and the Thames Water tariff strategy. The

former is based on consumption and will introduce

tariff structures based on time slices (night and day

for example) whereas the latter is based on social

characteristics of the customer such as his level of

living and therefore will introduce tariffs that depend

on consumption. Despite these differences the

catalogue model must provide a generic structure

that could be instantiated in the catalogue to

represent either the PPC kind of tariff structure or

the Thames Water type of tariff structure.

Overview of the catalogue model

Figure 4 shows the catalogue model that has

been designed with the CASE tool Rational ROSE

and it is presented in as a class diagram using the

UML notations.

VUM / VUSUser DB

Customer

Profiling

Customer

Generic

Catalogue

Generic

Workflow

Engine

Support Technologies

Apache web server, Tomcat application server

TIBCO integration platform

Energy Sales & Care technologies, TDWH, FORTE, XML, XQL

Oracle, DB2

Oracle, DB2 XML

Meta models

e-utilities

Java, Java JDK, Java Jaxp etc..

VUM / VUS

Prospect

Consumer

Profiling

Customer

DB Catalogue

Generic

Workflow

Engine

Support Technologies

Product Offering Contracting Billing &Payment

Oracle, DB2

Oracle, DB2 XML

e-utilities

Intelligent Miner

Marketing Consumer Data Collection

Customer servicing

Figure 2: The functional architecture of the e-utilities

•

com portal

THE CONCEPT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MARKET PLACE E-UTILITIES•COM

341

The catalogue model is composed of a set of

interrelated concepts modelled as UML classes in

Figure 4. As shown in the Figure, the catalogue

model is centred around four key concepts, namely

CustomerCategory, ProductClass, Product and

Tariff. Each of these concepts is a class of the UML

diagram.

The CustomerCategory concept represents

categories of customers identified by the e-

utilities.com. Low Voltage, Residential, Commercial

are examples of customercategories.

The ProductClass concept represents classes of

products that are associated in the e-utilities.com to

one or several categories of customers. For instance,

different Water and Waste Water products are all

together grouped into the Water &Waste Water

productclass.

The Product concept represents the real products

and services commercialised by the utility

companies in the e-utilities.com. Metered Water

Supply is an example of product. An interesting

distinction brought out by the catalogue model is the

one of unitary product which is sold by its own

versus a package which is composed of package

elements that can be products sold independently or

just elements which make sense only in conjunction

with other elements that compose the package.

Figure 5 gives the example of the package called

GEW Residentia .com that belongs to the product

class ‘commodity goods’ and is offered as a e-

utilities•com package.

The Figure 5 shows that the package is

composed of 4 elements, namely Metered Gas that is

a commoditygoods provided by GDF, BEC that is a

commoditygoods provided by PPC, Installation that

is a servicegoods provided by PPC and Unmetered

Water that is a commoditygoods provided by

Thames Water. The package is therefore a multi-

utility and multi company package..

Finally, the concept of Tariff represents the

different tariffs of the e-utilities.com companies. As

can be seen in Figure 4, the class Tariff has four of

sub-types such as TimeBasedTariff, BranchingTariff,

UnitaryTariff and compound tariffs.

- The UnitaryTariff corresponds to the case

where pricing depends of a fixed parameter

such as the consumed quantity of

electricity.

- In a CompoundTariff pricing of an element

is obtained by breaking out the amount to

bill into parts having each its own billing

formula.

- The BranchingTariff is a complex structure

including different sub-tariffs applicable

under specific conditions.

- In a TimeBasedTariff pricing is time

dependent.

Figure 6 illustrates a compound tariff and its

attachment to the unitary product called ‘Small

Consumption’ supplied by RWE (Company) only in

Germany (Gepographical Area). The Figure

illustrates the hierarchical attachment of this unitary

product to the product class Gas Level1 which is

part of the more general product class Commodity

(E-utilities(b), 2002).

Catalogue

Model

RWE

Catalogue

instantiates

PPC

Catalogue

Z.com

Catalogue

e-utilities.com Catalogue

ure 3: Catalo

ue model and catalo

ICEIS 2004 - DATABASES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

342

The SmallConsumption product is linked to the

SmallConsumption

tariff which is a compound tariff

combining two linear tariffs to respectively bill the

fixed charges and the consumption charges. The first

linear tariff T

SmallConsumptionfixedcharges

serves to

calculate the fixed charges by the formula:

fixedcharges = 2,935*period. The second linear

tariff T

SmallConsumptionfvariablecharges

serves to calculate the

consumption charges such as consumptioncharges

= 0,04*qty.

3.1 e-utilities•com Customer profiling

component

The Consumer Profiling (CP) component addresses

the needs of businesses to better understand

individual customer’s needs and appeal to personal

views (E-utilities, 2001). CP plays a main role to

provide businesses the abilities to well manage the

relationships with their customers and to serve them

better with the appropriate and appealing products

and services that are customised for them to meet

their needs.

Distinguishing customer and prospect

In addition to the profiling ability to the

customers of the e-utilities

•

com, the capability to

score the prospects is also important to support the

‘best fit’ offering or the product/service comparison

functionality of the e-utilities

•

com.

A prospect is a consumer who maybe unknown,

or maybe less known and not familiar to the e-

utilities

•

com. Here in this project, we consider a

prospect may be a first time user, or an existing

customer of other utility companies, who has the

potential to switch to be the customers of our e-

utilities

•

com.

Thus, we consider that the prospect and the

customer are two different objects. This is reflected

in the portal architecture drawn in Figure 2 by the

presence of two different databases, the Prospect DB

and the Customer DB, respectively.

As there is the customer database which contains

the customer data from the participating utility

companies to e-utilities

•

com to support customer

profiling, it is also needed to create a database

populating some prospect data to support prospect

scoring. The use of this database is to primarily

capture prospect details and support the scoring and

product selection work within the VUM/VUS, but

also to provide the basic customer oriented data

store for when a prospect is ready to contract with

the e-utilities

•

com company. In addition this

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THE CONCEPT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MARKET PLACE E-UTILITIES•COM

343

database will be the source from which updated data

will be extracted to perform offline data mining and

customer profiling activities to better fit the

comprehending and predictive models.

Customer profiling and prospect scoring

processes

Since the prospect and the customer are two

different objects, which deal with in the whole

VUM/VUS process, different ways of working are

therefore generated to handle the prospect and the

customer respectively. Whereas the ability to score

the prospect is one of the main functionality of the

VUM, the customer profiling function is embedded

in the VUS.

Furthermore, before a model can be applied to

scoring a new prospect on line, this model needs to

be trained to do it offline in the preparation stage by

being fed the existing prospect data. Figure 7 shows

the two stages necessary in prediction data mining

procedure, i.e. the training process and the applying

processes.

Prediction is normally connected with supervised

learning. The essence of supervised learning is to

train (estimate) a model on a portion of data, then

test and validate it on the remainder of the data. A

model is built when the cycle of training and testing

is completed. The model will then be used to apply

for new data. This is the stage called applying

process. It should be in mind that the training data

and applying data should have the same attributes.

For that reason, the operations for prospect

scoring are divided into two different processes, one

for training the prospect scoring while another for

applying the prospect scoring to new prospect who

come to visit VUM for the first time.

Consequently, there are now three different

processes for each of the purposes mentioned above.

These three processes are drawn in Figures 8, 9 and

10.

Preparing for Prospect Scoring

This process is for the preliminary stage prior to

the rollout of the VUM. Feeding in the information

from the current prospect database from the user

companies, to train the scoring model and then make

it generic to the overall utility market, in order to

have this scoring component ready to score

prospects online in the future.

On-line Prospect Scoring

This demonstrates, when the e-utilities web site

is running; how this scoring component works with

VUM to online score the prospects that visit the web

site, based on the information they provide.

Customer Profiling for VUS

This basically demonstrates the CP component’s

work with VUS after the prospect decides to become

the customer of the e-utilities, whenever the e-

utilities feel like to understand its customers’

behavior.

commodity goods

GDFGDF

GEW

Residential

..comcom

PackagePackage

commoditygoodscommoditygoods

..comcom

basic

optional

BEC

Installation

Metered

Gas

Unmetered

Water

serviceservice goodsgoods

PPCPPC

commodity goods

PPCPPC

commodity goods

ThamesWaterThamesWater

ure 5: Multi utilit

and multi com

acka

ICEIS 2004 - DATABASES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

344

:CompoundPC

name :Commodity

:CompoundPC

name :Gas

+subclass

:SinglePC

name :Level 1

+subclass

:Unitary

name :SmallConsumption

+composedof

:Company

name :RWE

nationality :Germany

+company

:GeographicalArea

continent :Europe

country:Germany

region: *

+isrelatedto

:CompoundTariff

name : T

Smallconsumption

Pricing()

+associatedto

:LinearTariff

name : T

FixedCharges

typeofunit : month

unitprice : 2,935

Pricing()

+composedof

:LinearTariff

name : T

consumptioncharges

typeofunit : m

unitprice : 0,004

Pricing()

ure 6: Com

ound tariff a

licable to the unitar

roduct Small Consum

tion

Figure 7: Prospect, Catalogue and VUM

THE CONCEPT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MARKET PLACE E-UTILITIES•COM

345

Produce

business

models for

prospect

scoring

Modelling

Run data

mining

experiments

Data Mining

Interpret

results

Interpreting

Goals

Objects

Measures

Results

Delos Metamodels

DELOS

User

Information

KDD Metamodel

Domain Experts

Intelligent

Miner

Produce

generic

profiling scores

Generalising

Analytical

Results

Generic Rules

Scoring etc.

Express

generic model

in XML or data

object formats

Representing

e-utilities Experts

VUM

XML & Data

Object

XML + DB2 Scoring

Generic

Metamodel

Represent

prospect

information in

format

specified by

model

Preparing

Prospect Data

Prospect

Data

Prospect Model

PMML Metamodel

Preparing Prospect Scoring

SQL

Interview with

users

Utilities

Database

Prospect

Information

ure 8: Pre

arin

ros

ect scorin

Obtain

Information

from Prospect

Inputing

Prospect

Information

Score prospect

with respect to

scoring model

Scoring

Prospect

Product/

Service

Catalogue for

Appropriate

Products/

Services

Searching

Catalogue

Select

products/

services / a

Prospect

becomes a

Customer

Obtaining

Prospect

Selection

Prospect

Data

Prospect

Class

Suggested

Products/Services

HTML Forms

HTTP Server / Browser

DB2 Scoring

HTML Forms

HTTP Server / Browser

Prospect

Selections

Catalogue Search Engine

Catalogue Model

Catalogue

Data

Contracting

Procedure

off-line

Prospect

Entrance

E-utilities Web

Site

Run DM

Experiments

and Revise

Prospect

Model

Revising

Prospect

Model

Extract Data

from the

Customer

Database

Building a

Prospect

Database

Obtain

Prospect

Information

from Web

Dialogues

Building a

Customer

Database

Training Model

Prospect

Selections

DB2/Oracle

Prospect

Data

Prospect

Data

Prospect

Information

SQL

Intelligent Miner

e-utilities Experts

On-line Prospect Scoring

Figure 9: On-line prospect scoring

ICEIS 2004 - DATABASES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

346

4 CONCLUSION

In this paper we introduce the concept of a single

market place, e-utilities

•

com that combines and

integrates the products & services offers from

different utilities companies in order to meet more

effectively the needs and expectations of European

customers. The market place treats utilities as

customers to who are contracted by e-utilities

•

com

just like regular customers are treated for the energy

service provision.

The paper also shows that to support the

business concept of e-utilities

•

com, there is a need

for specific technologies and particularly for generic

technology such as the generic catalogue structure to

cope with the variety of catalogues and tariffs

proposed by the different utilities member of e-

utilities

•

com.

Finally, we would like to emphasize the strong

coupling between the business model and the e-

commerce application: (a) the portal would not have

been developed effectively without a deep reasoning

about the business model relevant in the new

deregulated market for energy utilities and (b) the

existence of web-technologies make possible the

develop of new business paradigms.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The e-utilities project No IST-2000-25416

entitled Transforming Utilities into Customer-

Centric Multi-Utilities is founded by the European

Community and developed by the E-UTILITIES

Consortium: composed of PPC, Greece, RWE,

Germany, RED SUARED PLC, UK, SIEMENS

HELLAS, Greece,

UMIST, UK and Université Paris1 Panthéon

Sorbonne, France.

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E-utilities(b), 2002. The Catalogue Model Instance.

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IJCAI-95.

Produce

business

models for

prospecting

Modelling

Run data

mining

experiments

Data Mining

Interpret

results

Interpreting

Express

results in XML

or data object

formats

Representing

Goals

Objects

Measures

Results

Analytical

Results

Delos Metamodels

DELOS

User

Information

KDD Metamodel

Domain Experts

Intelligent

Miner

PMML Metamodel

XML + DB2 Scoring

XML & Data

Object

VUS

Represent

customer

information in

format

specified by

model

Preparing

Customer Data

Customer

Data

Customer Data

Model

Customer Profiling

SQL

Interview with

users

Utilities

Customer

Database

Existing Utility

Customer Data

ure 10: Customer

rofilin

to VUS

THE CONCEPT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MARKET PLACE E-UTILITIES•COM

347