eBroker: an agent-based query routing system for distributed E-commerce databases

With the rapid increase in the number of E-commerce Web sites, Internet users are now able to purchase items from the Web. Nevertheless, the large number of E-commerce Web sites also brings about the problem of identifying sites that sell the desired products wanted by a potential buyer. To avoid broadcasting the same queries on products to large set of databases maintained at different E-commerce Web sites, buyers can rely on a query routing system that matches the queries with the E-commerce database content. Much of the previous work in query routing has focused on databases that are document collections and queries that involve text attributes only. We propose a new database selection technique designed for distributed E-commerce databases. The technique deals with queries that involve attributes of different data types. We have incorporated the proposed technique into an agent-based query routing system known as eBroker. The performance of e-Broker for the E-commerce databases of 5 online CD stores is reported