An approach to electronic brokerage in TINA environments

Abstract

The concept of Electronic Brokerage is based on the use of new information technologies so as to provide a service capable of facilitating and organising the relationship between customers and service providers in a multiservice environment. This new service supported by the so-called “Electronic Brokers”, will allow service providers to publish and advertise their offers and, at the same time, will help end-users to access the offered services and information in an easy and efficient way. This paper presents an architecture for this electronic brokerage service that is currently being developed within the scope of the ABS (Architecture for Information Brokerage Service) ACTS European project. Although mainly developed for “electronic commerce” environments, the paper tries to show how the ABS brokerage service architecture can be useful for multi-service supporting architectures such as TINA.