  One of the ultimate goals of e-commerce platforms is to satisfy various
shopping needs for their customers. Much efforts are devoted to creating
taxonomies or ontologies in e-commerce towards this goal. However, user needs
in e-commerce are still not well defined, and none of the existing ontologies
has the enough depth and breadth for universal user needs understanding. The
semantic gap in-between prevents shopping experience from being more
intelligent. In this paper, we propose to construct a large-scale e-commerce
cognitive concept net named "AliCoCo", which is practiced in Alibaba, the
largest Chinese e-commerce platform in the world. We formally define user needs
in e-commerce, then conceptualize them as nodes in the net. We present details
on how AliCoCo is constructed semi-automatically and its successful, ongoing
and potential applications in e-commerce.
