Modelling of the ODP Trader for use in resource discovery

As information technology expands from the workplace to the home, a huge variety of new vendors and services will become available to consumers. These services will fall into three main categories: information services, shopping and entertainment. One of the major problems facing an increasingly information-rich society is how to quickly and conveniently locate information which is provided by different servers throughout a large distributed system. The Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) deals with the problem of locating services/resources in a heterogeneous open distributed system through the standardisation of a trading function which is realised by a Trader. Although initially intended for dynamic binding of computational resources in a distributed system, it is apparent that the trading function has applications in community networking for service/resource location. The authors are interested in validating the Trader standard using coloured Petri nets (CPNs) and investigating Trader´s applicability in the provision of advanced information services