An Intelligent Shopping List - Combining Digital Paper with Product Ontologies

This paper proposes a novel system which automatically extracts the intended items to buy from a hand written shopping list. This intelligent shopping list relies on an ontology of the products which is provided by the shopping mall. In our scenario the shopping list is written on digital Anoto paper. After transmitting the hand written strokes to the computer, the list items are recognized by a hand writing recognition system. Next, the recognized text is parsed in order to detect the amount and the desired item. This is then matched to the underlying ontology and the intended order is recognized. Our current prototype works on an ontology of 300 products. In our real-world experiments we asked 20 persons to write shopping lists without any constrains.