Peering and querying e-catalog communities

More and more suppliers are offering access to their product or information portals (also called e-catalogs) via the Web. The key issue is how to efficiently integrate and query large, intricate, heterogeneous information sources such as e-catalogs. Traditional data integration approach, where the development of an integrated schema requires the understanding of both structure and semantics of all schemas of sources to be integrated, is hardly applicable because of the dynamic nature and size of the Web. We present WS-CatalogNet: a Web services based data sharing middleware infrastructure whose aims is to enhance the potential of e-catalogs by focusing on scalability and flexible aspects of their sharing and access.