Provision of market services for eCo compliant electronic marketplaces

The progress and wider dissemination of electronic commerce will be facilitated through interoperability infrastructures. Commerce Net's eCo framework is a promising effort in this direction. In the eCo framework, businesses participate in a marketplace through standard interfaces for their services and by exchanging standardized documents. This framework does not specify any further interfaces for the services a marketplace itself may offer. In this paper, we demonstrate that a rich set of marketplace-specific services such as automated discovery of the needed services, comparison shopping, and negotiation can be offered to market participants by introducing a marketplace as an eCo business. For this purpose, a previously developed marketplace, namely MOPPET, is made eCo-compliant. We demonstrate that introducing MOPPET as an eCo business increases the functionality of the eCo marker in the sense that several market specific services become available to the market participants.