An inclusive and extensible architecture for electronic brokerage

The output and experience of a large European project in Electronic Brokerage called "Generic Architecture for Information Availability" (GAIA) is presented. The paper describes a reference model and functional architecture for value-added mediation in Electronic Commerce. The customers are provided with a uniform way of accessing heterogeneous suppliers without changes in the supplier software. A way of employing distributed objects for large scale service integration and multi-enterprise transactions is shown. The issues encountered during the implementation of the CORBA-based pilot prototype and the application of the architecture in 3 diverse domains are presented.