A characterization of Web data sources to facilitate e-commerce transactions

E-commerce involves business activities that deal with the exchange of values for goods and services on the Internet where all transactions are carried out electronically. These activities consist of different operations that depend on data. Web data emanate from data sources that are inherently distributed and potentially heterogeneous. However, Web users, and indeed, participants of e-commerce transactions desire access to data without necessarily understanding the intricacies of the underlying data sources. Unfortunately, data infrastructure has not been a major focus of e-commerce research. In this paper, we characterize e-commerce data sets to reveal the storage requirements and other data management needs of such data. We specify a common-term vocabulary to make explicit the content of data, and hence, facilitate the integration of e-commerce data sets. Central to the semantic description of data is a filter mechanism that recognizes a context schema.