An architecture for information commerce systems

The increasing use of the Internet in business and commerce has created a number of new business op-portunities and the need for supporting models and platforms. One of these opportunities is information commerce (i-commerce), a special case of e-commerce focused on the purchase and sale of information as a commodity. In this paper we present an architecture for i-commerce systems using OPELIX (Open Personalized Electronic Information Commerce System) [11] as an example. OPELIX provides an open information commerce platform that enables enterprises to produce, sell, deliver, and manage information products and related services over the Internet. We focus on the notion of information marketplace, a virtual location that enables i-commerce, describe the business and do-main model for an information marketplace, and dis-cuss the role of intermediaries in this environment. The domain model is used as the basis for the software architecture of the OPELIX system. We dis-cuss the characteristics of the OPELIX architecture and compare our approach to related work in the field. 1