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SHOPS

Architecture Diagram: GIF

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Project Description

shops: Squirrel Hill Point of Sale

The shops system provides several features that are tailored to the small retailer who intends to survive on the basis of location, against larger chains.

The point is to provide a relative improvement in ordering capabilities and information management on the basis of free software for the smaller guy - because this will still further increase the problem solving capabilities of communities.

By utilizing the explosive capabilities of free software (derived from individuals, industry and academia alike), we can effectively represent the interests of small business.

The key feature of our approach is integration via Debian GNU/Linux of existing software to perform important capabilities. In addition to shops, we are building a live linux distribution remastered from the Knoppix genre, called Shoppix, which includes shops, as well as a coherent installation containing many other free software systems which we will use to severely augment the shops system, which we add as part of our packaging effort.

The main features of the shops system are:

Version 0.9.5 includes the following features:

  • Automatic inventory reordering
    • Based on projected sales, current inventory
    • Maximize expected profit and customer satisfaction
    • Choose the cheapest supplier or the quickest one
  • Product locator (useful for rare items like surplus)
  • Tracking of all sales
    • Support for dynamic pricing to determine appropriate regional pricing
    • Ability to price differently to different demographics
    • Special handling of accounts
    • Automatic generation of window displays
  • Tracking of all requests
    • Ability to put items on order and contact customer when they arrive.
    • Tracking of product and service requests.
  • Tracking of all jobs
    • Barcodes for every job item
    • Ability to choose services from unlimited number of subcontractors
    • Detailed understand of pricing options
  • Agenda based employee management
    • Direct employee to perform certain operations well in advance of their deadline
    • Sensitive understanding of deadline options
    • Sophisticated time management planning, based on expected profit and customer satisfaction.

Planned for Squirrel Hill POS System, Release 1.0

  • INVENTORY AQUISITION
    • Integration with agenda system - cost/benefit analysis
    • Sophisticated Supplier Planning and Integration
    • Web based tracking using CSIMS/Ariadne/XWrapElite/etc
    • Ecommerce/Liquidation/Ebay asset aquisition
  • INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
    • Knowledge based inventory management
    • Ontological categorization of inventory using OpenCyc
    • Ability to select inventory by formula
    • Ability to group inventory, and edit inventory KBS
    • Learning of product equivalence classes (thanks to Gopi Flaherty)
    • Detect lemons - i.e. defective products
    • Object Oriented Management of Inventory classes using Perl OO
    • Allow poly of treatment of inventory
    • Whether internal use, repairs, returns, or stock.
    • Image based inventory management
    • Storage of product photographs
    • Displayable on Kiosks, e-commerce websites, Ebay and window displays
    • OCR of product information on labels.
    • Question Answering (nlp) applied to product labels and defaulting to WWW.
    • Wavelet-based image/product retrieval
    • similar products/categories.
    • Algebraicly closed operations
    • For dealing with inventory location
    • For dealing with inventory uncertainty
    • Customer face detection and recognition using OpenCV
    • Dynamic pricing
    • Sensitive mechanisms for pricing based on facial recognition and datamining of inventory KBS.
    • Reordering
    • Classes
    • Subcontractor Bulletin
    • Business Process Intelligent Tutoring Systems to Retain and Train Employees
    • Store Operations manager using PDDL2.2
    • Expert system representation of organizational tasks using Jess, Clips, OpenCyc or equivalent.
  • SECURITY
    • VSAM

Capabilities

  • Note that setanta will be problematic, like shops, unless we do the proper software engineering things. We need to increase security monitoring, and this would involve teaching me how to do it.
  • Notice similarities between shops and setanta
  • There is a lot of interest relatively speaking in shops.sf.net, we have to update that so people know where the current version is.
  • Sorcerer, -a shops
  • Sorcerer, -n shops
  • Perhaps invent.blend could be made into an applet that users could download to display inventory from shops for online browsing.
  • Obviously shops should have a web based method of accessing the contents, for online customers.
  • We could use c4.5 to determine customer purchase behaviour for shops
  • shops should use ARMiner to mine product association rules.
  • Secondly we can use UML tools to design IM/broker/shops to be a general purpose system. The IM features should be OO and independent of shops, which is simply the pricing mechanism, along with broker. The idea is of inventory/goods Input/Output. I.e. buying and selling are featured more symmetrically within the system. Only later are front ends thrown on the thing.
  • The notion of modelling people's interests with shops is funny - model interests and tasks as a sell.
  • I was thinking maybe mstevens would be interested in a deal where we all sit down, one day out of each week, and simply finish a system. For instance, we could sit down and finish shops.
  • We can start with a manual todo list - the shops agenda system. That way, I can put deadlines on certain tasks, also assert preconditions in the planner for these tasks. Cool
  • There is a simple way to plans/ parts lists and integration to broker/shops for our construction projects and that is simply like ingrediants.
  • shops should have a command line interface, called shops
  • shops IR light.
  • Here are some of the things we need to do next: fix the way pse craps out all the time, get Clairvoyance working and with some basic document management systems, including for instance authorized reports to ensure back to me that various people are learning various things (based on testing), find some way to get those recipes normalized, get shops up and running and taking inventory of everything I have, add this information to verber, get MDR (minimum detection route) planning operational, get new tagsets for AWB/Predator working, fix problem with script determining perl dependencies, make packages of my systems and upload, fix mini-dinstall problem, write tutorial on agentification, agentify or otherwise get command line bugzilla working, fix up manager with sleep learning capabilities, create a sample course for clairvoyance, and run backup. You're such a lazy guy, you know that?

This page is part of the FWeb package.
It derives from the Robotics Institute projects page.
Last updated Mon Jan 15 08:39:09 CST 2007 .