Business models for the implementation of mediating electronic product catalogs

Despite the rapidly growing number of companies that present their products on the Internet a global search for products and comparative analysis of their respective features and attributes is impeded by semantic differences between the catalogs offered Over the last years a few approaches to electronic product catalogs have emerged that specifically try to deal with the problems of semantic heterogeneity of product specifications. For the practical application of these technologies three basic types of business models can be identified enabling a wide variety of business scenarios ranging from the support of purchasing and sales operations to the streamlining and optimization of sourcing processes of resellers and large organizations.