Catalog Sharing through Catalog Interoperability

Electronic catalogs (or e-catalogs), like their printed counterparts, hold information about the goods and services offered or requested by the market participants and, consequently, form the basis of the information phase of electronic commerce. As electronic malls as well as e-catalogs made by each of them rapidly increase in number, there are some emerging problems in dealing with e-catalogs such as the catalog heterogeneity and the redundant investment in the making of catalogs. In this paper, to achieve catalog interoperability and catalog sharing, we propose an extended catalog model of e-catalogs and present a viewintegrated architecture for an electronic catalog library, named CatalogStop. The Live Catalog in CatalogStop is a virtual catalog that can be bound directly to the contents in the catalog repository or to a query that will retrieve the contents from possibly distributed and heterogeneous catalog sources using a standard protocol.