Abstract

Solving queries to support e-commerce transactions can involve retrieving and integrating information from multiple information resources. Often, users don't care which resources are used to answer their query. In such situations, the ideal solution would be to hide from the user the details of the resources involved in solving a particular query. An example would be providing seamless access to a set of heterogeneous electronic product catalogues. There are many problems that must be addressed before such a solution can be provided. In this paper, we discuss a number of these problems, indicate how we have addressed these and go on to describe the proof-of-concept demonstration system we have developed.

Citations