We first present the findings of 1996 research on on-line commercial activities showing a lack of technological support for such electronic commerce. In fact, there were few signs of trading and negotiation was virtually nonexistent on-line. We also give a case study of an information retrieval system that has the potential to become an on-line brokerage service, then identify and expand the key requirements for electronic commerce. We give an overview of the OSM¹ architecture for an electronic market-place and we show how its framework may be used. The paper closes with a bibliography.