Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1998-09-29
2001-10-30
Black, Thomas (Department: 2171)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C705S037000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06311178
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a computer matching system and the method therefor, or specifically, relates to electronic trading system which is a multi-element confidence matching system built on a database for matching a user's requirement with the offers provided by the other users, and returns the matching results to the user.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
What the traders are currently dealing with is the world trade market, and traders need to trade with traders in other countries efficiently and reliably, therefore electronic trading systems are used wider and wider in the international trade practice in recent years.
So far, there are many electronic trading systems used in international trade, such as EDI(Electronic Data Interchange), but EDI is used to help traders to send or receive offer to/from designated traders, it can not be used to help traders to find offers which they are interested
There are trading systems which help traders to find the goods they need from the other traders, or help them to find buyers for their goods, and help them cope with a lot of business related affairs
The task of the trading systems is to match trader's requirements with offers that have been posted by other traders via the electronic trading system. This is normally achieved by doing a direct search of user criteria with the offers available and displaying just the plain results of the search in generic order
Attempt to find the best result in response to criteria specified by users is a very old subject in the information technology So many different methods of query and matching systems have been implemented and is improving every day. Most of the systems are using the industry standard tools for their purpose and their flexibility extends to what those tools can do for them Standard search engines mainly examine the search criteria and the result they produce is a set of zero, one or many cases that match exactly all the conditions of criteria. No matter how many conditions a case has satisfied, if fails in one that case will not be a part of result set, even if the condition is the least important among others Specially with ranges, mainly users might want to have choices that are not exactly complying with what they want but close to that In other words database engines like Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Ingres and others have only two choices for matching cases, “Match” and “No Match”.
With the conventional trading system, when a user gives a search criteria, normally an overwhelming amount of information is returned, the user must find out what he is interested in, and if necessary, he may add some more conditions in the criteria, or input a further search criteria or formula, so as to conduct another search to reduce the amount of the information returned. Apparently, he must narrow the results by himself, until he finds a satisfying result He must search from one category to another category, and he must read the information displayed on the screen carefully each time before he selects a new search criteria, and without the user's intervention during the search process, the search can not be conducted successively. On one hand, if the search criteria contains too few conditions, the returned information may be too much, most of which may not be the information he is interested in. On the other hand, if the search criteria contains too many conditions, the user may miss the information which is most important to him, because of failure to satisfy a not so important condition, as described above.
Therefore, the conventional search system is not convenient for the user to use, and can not conduct search efficiently. When a user uses such a system, time and cost consumed in the search process is increased.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
It is an object of the present invention to provide a multi-element confidence matching system, which can automatically provide the user or trader with the information he is interested in without the intervention of the trader, and give the user the maximum amount of information about offers which may meet their requirement, so as to give the trader the ability to not just see offers which exactly match their criteria, but ones which come close or can fulfill part of, or more than, their needs, thereby the trader may conduct the search efficiently.
Advantageously, the present invention adds a level of sophistication to standard tools, and implements user's thoughts in accepting or rejecting cases It means by involving more parameters of user's choices, the system will be able to tolerate the result and based on user's preference accept those cases that comply with the most important conditions and only fail to satisfy minor conditions.
To achieve the above objects and advantages, the present invention provides a computer matching system used by a plurality of users and the method therefor, said system comprising a database; an offer creation program means for creating an entity for an offer input by each user in the database and storing said offer therein; and a search engine for comparing and matching a requirement input by a user with other users' offers stored in the database and returning matching results to said user
It is preferred that in the computer matching system of the present invention, said requirement includes multiple elements as search criteria, each of said elements is assigned a weight of importance thereby each matching result has a search score indicating satisfaction level of said user, said search engine further perform ordering and ranking of said matching results according to the respective search scores thereof, and only the matching results have search scores above a predetermined satisfaction level are returned to said user.
It is also preferred that said user interface to said matching system is via the internet.
The foregoing and other objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become more readily apparent from the following detailed description of preferred embodiments of the invention which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.
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Bi Fujun
Bliss Shaun
Li Ran
Nojoomi Reza
Yan Hong
Black Thomas
Flehr Hohbach Test Albritton & Herbert LLP
Wang Mary
Webplus, Ltd.
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