In this paper, we describe a scenario for a distributed marketplace on the Web where resource discovery agents find out about
resources that may want to join the marketplace and electronic commerce is realized through buying agents representing the
customers and the selling agents representing the resources like electronic catalogs. We propose a possible architecture which
is based on the emerging technologies and standards. In this architecture, the resources expose their metadata using Resource
Description Framework (RDF) to be accessed by the resource discovery agents and their content through Extensible Markup Language
(XML) to be accessed by the selling agents by using Document Object Model (DOM). The marketplace contains Document Type Definitions
(DTDs) and a dictionary of synonyms to be used by the buying agents to help the customer to specify the item s/he wishes to
purchase. Distribution infrastructure is CORBA and Web on which the buying and selling agents find out about each other using
Trading Object Services. The modifications necessary to the proposed architecture considering only the available technology
are also discussed.
This work is partially being supported by Middle East Technical University, the Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences,
Project Number: AFP-97-07.02.08 and by the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey, Project Number: 197E038