Product catalogs are heterogeneous by nature.
Data sources are disparate and data structures are often quite complex.
Current eCatalog Management Applications are inherently limited since they all rely only on existing database technologies, which by nature cater to homogeneous data. To work around this fundamental problem, existing eCatalog Management Applications require classification, cleansing and normalization of product information during the data acquisition stage. Enterprises are faced with this expensive, manual, non-scalable process of acquiring product attributes, classifying data and maintaining updates from multiple sources. By using Product Directory, enterprises are freed from the non-scalable process of classification, cleansing and normalization of categories and attributes from multiple sources. With Product Directory there is no need to pre-define the structure of the master catalog and new product attributes can be created on the fly.