An electronic marketplace architecture
Asuman Doğaç, Ilker Durusoy, Sena Arpinar, Nesime Tatbul, Pınar Köksal · 1999
In this paper, we describe a scenario for a distributed marketplace whose scope can be the whole Web where resource discovery agents find out about resources that may want to join the marketplace and electronic commerce is realised through buying agents representing the customers and the selling agents representing the resources like electronic catalogs. The marketplace contains an Intelligent Directory Service (IDS) which makes it possible for agents to find out about each other and also contains references to the related Document Type Definitions (DTDs). We propose a possible architecture to support this scenario 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 IDS contains the template workflows for buying and selling agents, a trader mechanism, Resource Discovery Agents, 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. The agents and IDS communicate through KQML messages. The modifications necessary to the proposed architecture considering only the available technology are also discussed.