The TSIMMIS Approach to Mediation: Data Models and Languages
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems - Special issue: next generation information technologies and systems
Modeling Web sources for information integration
AAAI '98/IAAI '98 Proceedings of the fifteenth national/tenth conference on Artificial intelligence/Innovative applications of artificial intelligence
Fundamentals of Database Systems
Fundamentals of Database Systems
XViews: XML Views of Relational Schemas
DEXA '99 Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Database & Expert Systems Applications
EC-WEB '02 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on E-Commerce and Web Technologies
Software agents and wireless E-commerce
ACM SIGecom Exchanges
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With the advent of e-commerce, web shops - where a potential buyer can make a purchase transaction on the web - are becoming commonplace. In everyday life, as buyers we face a typical need for matching or coordinating a host of articles/services before taking the purchase decision. Very often the articles/services (items) which we seek to buy are marketed by completely different shops/agencies, necessitating visits to different shops. The same situation translated to the web, means that the shopper has to make visits to several different web-sites and evaluate articles before taking the purchase decision. Just as in real life, as a first step the right web-shops have to be identified. Although, a search engine can do this, it would take a smart choice of search words to hit upon the "right" shops. "Right" in terms of the items they trade in and the geographical proximity to the shopper. Next comes the aspect of coordinating the chosen items. Clearly, this is very inconvenient because the various items cannot be compared simultaneously. To facilitate this requirement, what is needed is a Mediator, which provides a functional integration of the Web Shops of interest. Further, given the ubiquity of the requirement, a mediation mechanism, which is not only easy-to-use but also easy-to-create, easy-to-deploy and easy-to-maintain, is required. A novel yet simple mediator architecture is described here for mediating e-commerce sites founded on relational databases. The mechanism has been conceptualized to facilitate transactions in the B2C realm of E-Commerce.