An electronic broker for business-to-business electronic commerce on the Internet

Distributed object standards provide a key to building interoperable applications that can run on a range of platforms. The paper describes a CORBA-based research prototype for an electronic broker in business-to-business electronic commerce. High-level IDL specifications are used to achieve interoperability between components of the electronic marketplace. The two key functionalities of the electronic broker are the ability to dynamically gather information from remote electronic catalogs and the support for negotiations through auction mechanisms. The paper discusses the functionality and the design of the electronic broker and gives an overview of current extensions of the prototype. As application-level interoperability is a crucial precondition for many brokerage services, we put special emphasis on electronic commerce protocol standards.