User Profiles in Commercial Interaction Web Portals

The use of Web portals to carry out on-line transactions is continuously increasing. This paper studies this type of Web portals (which we have denominated as Commercial Interaction) from the perspective of data quality, since we consider that this is an essential element if Web portals are to be competitive and their use is to be boosted. The quality of data in a Web portal is determined on the basis of a set of data quality characteristics. However, we have established that some data quality characteristics are more important than others according to various user profiles, based on demographic aspects (gender, age range, level of studies and type of organisation). In order to do that, Commercial Interaction Web portal users were surveyed and, as a result of that, three different user profiles were identified. This paper describes the survey development and the generation of the user profiles.