Structured Documents for Representing Services in Internet Marketplaces

Internet Marketplaces are a new computational paradigm with a huge economic potential. These markets extend the concept of electronic commerce by putting an emphasis on simple access and combination of data and computational services. Among the diierent market services ooered, service repositories are vital for the success of the Internet Marketplace. Service repositories not only act as interfaces between marketplace users (i.e., customers and providers) and the marketplace infrastructure, but also between the diierent heterogeneous services. On the one hand, they should allow service providers to register their complex services with minimal eeort. On the other hand, customers should be able to locate and combine services easily without having to struggle with technical details. Additionally, because of highly dynamic service collections service repositories should be open and extensible In this paper, we present our MMM service market architecture in which service registration , selection, and execution is based on structured documents capturing meta information about services. Providers register their services by simply posting structured documents to service repositories, very much like setting up a Web page on the WWW. Stored within struc-tured document repositories, these documents can then be queried by customers before service execution. Bringing the paradigm of structured documents to Internet Marketplaces is new and, as we argue in the paper, ooers new horizons for Internet Marketplaces.