Doing business in the information marketplace: a case study

Fueled by the rapid development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, electronic commerce has become one of the fastest-growing areas within computer science and within intelligent agents research, in particular. In this paper, we approach electronic commerce from the perspective of an industrial vendor of electronic information services. The underlying model is that of an information marketplace, with producers, vendors, facilitators, and consumers. The contributions of the paper are fourfold. First, we describe a novel model of electronic commerce that is particularly geared towards operationalization of vendors’ business models. Second, we describe the architecture of a vendor service in the information marketplace that implements the electronic commerce model. Third, the paper provides a case study of a large industrial online information service developed based on this architecture. Fourth, we outline requirements and possible benefits of the usage of intelligent agent technology in a commerce-enabled digital library.