Publish/Subscribe (P/S) technology conceptually divides resource managers (RM’s) and applications within a transaction tree
into two categories: resource producers and resource consumers. Publishers enqueue information and the P/S system pushes it
to the subscribers. Applying the P/S paradigm to Internet-based E-Commerce (sometimes also known as Webcasting), the RM’s that produce and consume information can be real people. In this case, customers subscribe voluntarily or unknowingly
to provide merchants their own information. Based on these customer profiles which may include information about their household
or buying patterns, companies make decisions to push products and marketing messages to the relevant prospects electronically.
Up until now, the Internet P/S mechanism was managed in a rather ad-hoc manner. Although in most cases the customer profiles
are stored in RDBMS’s, other objects such as products, promotion plans, web pages, news items, marketing messages, and service
contracts are not modelled formally. As a result, it requires excessive human intervention to match the subscriber-base; it
thus fails to support very high volume and flexible push of relevant and just-in-time information.