Information and interaction in marketspace: towards an open agent-based market infrastructure

The lack of structure of information and interaction in current web-based electronic commerce makes partial or full automation infeasible. We describe the first steps towards an open agent-based market infrastructure, with well-defined information and interaction models allowing agents to locate relevant market participants, exchange interests, and negotiate deals. We also describe an architecture and a prototype based on these ideas, and illustrate the operation of the prototype in an example scenario.