Abstract

Internet based commerce is evolving at a rapid pace with companies vying to set up a Web front for shopping by their existing and prospective clients. However there is a problem, when an individual user wants to gather information from competing online stores. In the current electronic commerce world, stores are not connected in a seamless fashion, except in a few cases where the stores belong to the same vendor. Each online marketplace requires different log on procedures, has a separate set of rules for fulfilling orders and, more than likely, has a different business model for charging for its services. In this major report, we study the evolution of the Web based electronic commerce and the Consumer's perspective on such systems. We identify two major shortcomings in the current generation electronic commerce systems: (a) lack of infrastructure for buyers to quickly and easily obtain product information from multiple vendors and (b) lack of consistent user interface across data retrieved from multiple sources, We present in this report a Data Integration System to resolve these shortcomings. The proposed System architecture uses a three fold solution: the Web, which makes electronic commerce accessible to anyone with a browser, eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which allows information on disparate systems to be shared; and industry standards like common ontology and Document Type Definition (DTD) that define protocols for different transactions. The system feasibility is demonstrated by developing a prototype using VisualAge for Java.