Metadata Mediation: Representation and Protocol

We are developing an electric commerce mediator (ECM), a system which enables a consumer to retrieve data about merchandises sold on the WWW by designating the features of the merchandise. In this paper we will present (1) Multi-Schema Metadata Format (MMF), a logical structure for metadata sets, and (2) Metadata Mediation Protocol (MMP), a protocol set for interchanging metadata, which are designed for the ECM.