An Information Brokerage Service Architecture for Electronic Commerce

The number of on-line structured information sources especially over the Internet is rapidly increasing. These sources include mainly commercial databases on product information which are exploited from various enterprises to form the so-called “electronic stores” or “virtual shopping malls”. However it is still often a burden for the users to locate the “right” information sources and even harder and very time consuming if they want to compare the characteristics of similar or identical items. On the other hand, service providers often encounter practical difficulties in advertising their offers efficiently. The ABS (Architecture for Information Brokerage Services) project is dealing with the definition and implementation of a generic brokerage architecture aiming in providing unified access to distributed, heterogeneous information sources in the context of the emerging “global market” by efficiently supporting it’s potential actors (users and content providers). In this paper we describe the requirements, the design and the implementation choices of an information brokerage architecture as it has been developed in the framework of ABS. The information sources we are using are either accessed via SQL or CGI scripts. For the implementation we exploit the OMG CORBA architecture using OrbixWeb for JAVA for the object implementation. The supporting services, such us access and communication, are implemented based on the definitions of TINA-C for service architecture components.