E-union: concept and framework of open B2B e-trading marketplaces

With its great explosion and the advancement of related technology and services, such as the World-Wide-Web (WWW), the Internet has provided a rich environment for building Internet-based electronic commerce (e-Commerce) applications. Among the different types of e-Commerce, business-to-business (B-to-B) is the one most widespread in terms of turnover. The B2B e-trading marketplaces (also called B2B-Exchanges), which have sparked a revolution in the way that businesses buy and sell products from each other, are an essential component of B2B applications. However, currently, it is often the case that, within an e-commerce sector, many e-trading marketplaces were developed and hosted by different companies, each forming a closed system with their own customers and clients. In this paper, we describe the concept of e-Union, which integrates the services provided by different e -trading sites to provide an open e-trading service. We present the design of a mobile agent enabled framework for building such an open e-trading marketplace environment and describe a prototypical implementation.