The Informed Traveller: A Case Study in Building Internet Brokering Services

In traditional commerce, brokers act as middlemen between customers and providers, aggregating, repackaging and adding value to products, services or information. In today’s Web, such services are generally lacking with the result that individuals are forced to manually discover, collate and analyse information to meet their needs. This paper begins by presenting the design and implementation of a travel planning brokering system which provides a combined travel timetable service using information gleaned from existing Web services. The aim of this prototype was to gain experience as to the needs of Internet brokering systems in general. The lessons learned from the exercise have led to the design of a generic brokering framework, known as Metabroker. The framework provides commonly required functionality and support for popular communication protocols and data formats. Specialist brokers are then created by populating the base framework with the necessary business logic, in the form of workflows, to support the area of speciality of the broker. Our design integrates distributed object, metadata, workflow and object database technologies.