METU-Emar: An Agent-Based Electronic Marketplace on the Web

In this paper, we describe a scenario for a distributed marketplace on the Web where resource discovery agents find out about resources that may want to join the marketplace and electronic commerce is realized through buying agents representing the customers and the selling agents representing the resources like electronic catalogs. We propose a possible architecture which is based on the emerging technologies and standards. In this architecture, the resources expose their metadata using Resource Description Framework (RDF) to be accessed by the resource discovery agents and their content through Extensible Markup Language (XML) to be accessed by the selling agents by using Document Object Model (DOM). The marketplace contains Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and a dictionary of synonyms to be used by the buying agents to help the customer to specify the item s/he wishes to purchase. Distribution infrastructure is CORBA and Web on which the buying and selling agents find out about each other using Trading Object Services. The modifications necessary to the proposed architecture considering only the available technology are also discussed.