The architecture of a one-stop Web-window shop

With the advent of e-commerce, Web shops are becoming commonplace. The problem of shopping for complementary articles, like furniture, upholstery and carpets, which are sold by independent Web shops, necessitates a functional integration mechanism for integrating the Web shops of interest. To facilitate the shopper's need for mixing and matching articles before taking the purchase decision, a specialized query mechanism is required. To address this need, we propose an architecture for mediating complementary e-commerce sites, which is equipped with a special query mechanism providing prioritized querying and summary querying. Prioritized querying aids the shopper in specifying a series of prioritized alternative combinations of the desired items. Summary querying aids the shopper in isolating the most suitable combination from among the retrieved matches.