Distribution Issues in the Design and Implementation of a Virtual Market Place

Abstract

This paper describes an investigation into the distribution issues surrounding the design and implementation of virtual market places. The paper starts by describing the requirements customers and service providers have from a virtual market place. It is then shown how the requirements deemed most important can be addressed by exploiting the inherent distribution of certain aspects, and by distributing other aspects of such market places. In particular, the paper concentrates on the structuring of the information space describing the services and products, and its distribution between the providers and the market place mediator. Primarily, this supports the implementation of phased dialogues between the customer and the providers, while at the same time addressing the providers' desire to protect business sensitive processes and information. Distributing the dialogue in time allows customers and providers to interact more flexibly and to gradually build understanding and trust between them, before divulging any business or personally sensitive information to each other.The distributed approach supports a scalable market place and also points towards a way of addressing providers' legacy problems. It is also shown how the apparent contradiction of a distributed market place and the need to monitor and control it for regulation purposes can be addressed, without compromising the ability of the system to scale.Finally, the design and implementation of a virtual insurance market place using Java on a CORBA compliant platform are presented. The mixture of concerns, which has to be covered, coupled with currently evolving technology, offers the designers a large spectrum of options concerning how to design and implement such systems. How is a designer then to tackle the task? KeywordsThis paper proposes an approach, which is based on a careful analysis of the requirements which customers and providers have from a market place. The approach suggests exploiting the distribution inherent in such market places where possible, and introducing and enhancing it where it may not already exist. The distributed approach addresses the market place requirements deemed most important and can be used to create a variety of systems, each of which can be tailored to the specific requirements and the particular flavour of a different market domain.Chapter 2 describes the requirements which customers and providers have from virtual market places. Chapter 3 selects the most important requirements described in Chapter 2; these point towards the need to exploit the inherent distribution of certain aspects, and the need to distribute other aspects of such market places. The chapter outlines the principles upon which our distributed market place architecture is based. The rest of the paper demonstrates how these principles are applied in the design of our Virtual Market Place (ViMP) system. Chapter 4 discusses the relationship between the logical structuring of the market-place information space which describes the market goods, a...

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