Achieving interoperability through ODP trading function

Interoperability between autonomous decentralized systems needs support of an information service that can provide dynamic knowledge about available service providers within the network. In this paper, we describe trading service. Trading is an essential infrastructure function indicated by ODP (Open Distributed Processing) reference model, a metamodel of heterogeneous distributed processing. The purpose of trading is to support location transparency of services: it hides the location of service providers, even if they are located in separate, autonomous domains. Cooperation between trading service providers (traders) supports federation transparency, i.e. hides diierences of technology used in separate domains. In cooperation , the traders have to mediate service type diier-ences, negotiate policy diierences and tolerate technology diierences between domains. Together with other fundamental functions trading ooers a platform for open distributed computing between autonomous subsystems .