Digital catalog library: a shared repository of online catalogs for electronic commerce

Catalogs are an essential part of online commercial transactions. It is estimated that over 50% of the start-up cost of an average Internet shop is spent in building the digital catalogs that describe the products and services it offers. The manufacturers of the products must send their product information to each and every shop that carries their products. We present the architecture and technical issues of our DCL system. The primary objective of the system is to provide a shared repository of digital product catalogs for Internet shops to reduce the cost of catalog management. The manufacturer will upload the core catalogs that include the basic information about her products. The shop can download these core catalogs and build its own customized catalogs on top of them. The database is designed to accommodate evolving schemas for various product groups. The system also has a flexible categorization hierarchy which is used to define product classification