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This Glossary lists all relevant terms and concepts that are specific to creating and maintaining Product Guides or Guided Selling solutions.

Name / Concept	Notes	Example
WORKBENCH USER INTERFACE
main menu	The menu on the top in your web-browser. See Workbench views overview
navigation bar	The navigation bar with context-specific actions on the left side of your web-browser.
view	A view displayed by the Workbench to show data or perform certain configuration tasks.
GENERAL
account	Typically associated with a customer company	demo, playground
user	User of the Workbench associated with an account
role	Collection of permissions to perform certain actions or view certain data in the Workbench. Every user must have one or multiple roles.
permission	Atomic access right to a specific action (like Create Question)
DATA
data feed	The file that contains your product data. When Product Guides are rolled out to several countries / markets, excentos distinguishes between the Master Data Feed containing the product base information and the Offer Data with prices and availability.	product-assortment.csv, productdata.XML
data source	Source of product data (local or URI file)	product-assortment.csv
data attribute	Attribute of the product data source	price, brand, weight
data attribute value	Value of a specific entry (or 'data cell') of a data attribute in the data source	700,- € (in the "price" data attribute), Asics (in the "manufacturer" data attribute)
product	Record (or 'row') of a data source
product field / product attribute	Defined aspect of a product associated to one (or more) data attributes in the data source	price
product field value	Product specific value(s) of a product field	700,00
PROFILES and FIELDS
profile field	Defines an aspect within a domain specific user model, that serves to specify a certain user requirement. It determines the features (or constraints) for appropriate products. For this purpose a profile field is typically associated to one (or more) product fields (of the product data schema).
profile field domain	Domain of a profile field, specifying the set or range of valid profile field values	0 - 10.000
domain type	Specifies the type of a profile field domain (discrete, continuous, ordinal, numeric)	numeric
profile field value	User specific value (or constraint) for a profile field ( → concrete value selected by the user), typically associated to an Answer Option	<= 500
user profile	Specifies the product requirements a of an user by means of a constraint set associated to the fields (of a given product guide)
ELEMENTS OF A PRODUCT GUIDE
Product Guide	Instance of a product advisor visible in your website. Simplification of a former concept of hierarchy of project, system and application.
Product Guide concept / advisor concept	The Product Guide concept or advisor concept defines how all the (complex) buying decisions the user needs to make are presented to the user and how this is put into an effective selection process that is actually fun to use. It consists of all elements of a Product Guide described hereafter.
Question Flow, advisor process	Sequence of Stages and Facets of a Product Guide as well as the logic of the visibility of each Stage, Question and Answer Option. The Question Flow defines which Question and Answer Options are presented in what context and which order to the user, this is also called: the advisor process.
Stage	Collection of Questions in one Stage (i.e. one step in the Product Guide process)	Stage 1: Your requirements Stage 2: Your budget
Question (or Facet)	A Question (or more general: Facet) is the handler for a question/answer combination within a Stage of a Product Guide. The Question can be a real question (e.g. "what is your preferred brand?" with several Answer Options such as "Mustang", "Levis") or also a directly selectable option (e.g. for Boolean yes/no Facets such as "I want Bluetooth"). That's why, more generally spoken, they are called Facets.	Stage 2: Price
Answer Option	One or several Answer Options of a Question. More technically: Set of selectable value(s) (or constraints) presented to the user; associated to the domain of the profile field (could be empty e.g. for text search fields)	10, 20, 30, ..., 100 €
explanation content	The content used to explain and describe the Stages, Questions and Answer Options. The explanation content can consist of text, images and illustrations.
RECOMMENDATIONS
product recommendation	Presentation of one product in the recommendation list of the Product Guide. This is where all the intelligence of the excentos recommender comes in and presents the relevant products for the user's buying needs.
product recommendation card	The widget (or user interface element) that contains one product recommendation. Depending on the client theme it is displayed in a certain layout together with some product attributes (e.g. product name, price, manufacturer, articleID etc.) and a reasoning which describes why the product either fits or not.
recommendation list	List of product recommendations (structured by recommendation groups)
recommendation group	A group of several product recommendations within the recommendation list, e.g.	"Top Recommendations" (products that fulfill all user requirements) or "Alternatives" that don't match all of your requirements
Reason	A Reason is an argument why the product is recommended to the user. It reflects the user requirements (i.e. selected Answer Options relevant to a certain product attribute). There are 4 types of Reasons:
Pro Reason	Shown if the relevant product attribute of this recommendation matches to the selected Answer Option.	"+ your selected brand (Mustang)"
Con Reason	Shown if the product attribute does not match the selected Answer Option.	"- different brand (Levis instead of Mustang)"
Nearly Reason	Nearly Reasons are used if a product recommendation almost fulfills the corresponding selected Answer Option.	"~ a bit more expensive than expected (800 € instead of 750 €)"
Fill Reason	The Fill Reason is used if a product recommendation shall show "neutral" product attributes, no matter whether the user selected a corresponding Answer Option or not.	"Features: Front Suspension, Disc Brakes"

theme	The Theme defines the look and feel of your Product Guide and has a certain layout. You can style the theme according to your needs. See the list of our themes here.

In order to increase the readability of the Glossary and the Workbench documentation, capital letters are used for Guided Selling-specific terms, and lower-case letters for all other terms.

If you are looking for the description of widgets and user interface elements, please take a look at our User Interface Portfolio and the widgets of the User Interface Portfolio. Not all of the User Interface Portfolio elements are available in Workbench clients.