Integration of XML Data in Peer-to-Peer E-Commerce Applications

Abstract

E-commerce applications need new solutions in the field of integration, inter-change and transformation of data across the global marketplace. Such advanced data management features, which are expected to function automatically or semi-automatically, are necessary when a party looks for potential business partners, a buyer wants to find relevant supplier of the products, a seller wants to find potential customers or business partners negotiate a deal, and so on. In these e-commerce applications distributed systems based on the traditional client-server paradigm are nowadays replaced by peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. The goal of data management in P2P systems is to make use of a decentralized, easily extensible architecture in which any user can contribute new data or new schemas and mappings between other peer’s schemas. P2P data management systems replace traditional data integration systems based on single global schema with an interlinked collection of semantic mappings between peers’ individual schemas. The paper discusses this kind of P2P data management in e-commerce settings. A new proposal concerning schema mapping specification and query reformulation is presented.