Web Services for Transmitting Product Information in the Context of Business-to-Business Integration

Imagine that the product data of every online shop would be machinereadable and you could find the best product offers in an instant. Many e-business scenarios, such as price comparers, electronic markets, product search engines, and shop directories require integration of distributed heterogeneous information systems. Information extraction from heterogeneous Web sites has been a research topic for a long time. A frequently used approach for automatic information aggregation is to parse and extract information directly from Web pages. The main problem of these software routines is to find appropriate methods for parsing HTML pages. Web services on the other hand enable software routines to directly communicate with distributed information systems, therefore there is no need for parsing Web pages anymore. This paper examines new opportunities and challenges related to real-time product information transmission using Web services. The minimal characteristics that are common to all Web services and their application to a collaborative scenario between price comparers and online shops will be presented. In order to automate the information system integration we suggest that it is necessary to standardize the Web service interface for accessing product information from online shops. This is demonstrated by an example implementation. The main contribution of this paper is the practical aspect of using Web service semantics and technologies for real-time product information transmission.