IMP: an architecture for virtual enterprises for electronic service delivery

The Internet is already being exploited extensively for electronic commerce. Research and development by CSIRO towards a virtual enterprise (a “marketplace”) has initially been aimed at the spatial information systems domain. The IMP (Internet MarketPlace) is a systems architecture for a marketplace. The central design objective is to achieve interoperability in large-scale collections of autonomous, heterogeneous data and processing resources. The crucial constraint is that entry barriers to participation by prospective service providers should be low. These entry barriers include the surrender of autonomy and the cost of building systems to deliver services or to modify existing systems. The solution hinges on a systems-architectural model and a thin set of standards for the description of services and the invocation and delivery of a service. The IMP architecture has two basic types of service: the query service and the derivation services. A query service is essentially a data service; it offers extraction (selection) of data from a store. A derivation service derives data from customer-supplied data, possibly with reference to private data