The concept of federated electronic markets

The potential of the Internet for new electronic forms of doing business has given rise to the development of new platforms for electronic commerce. But, even though the main feature of this platforms is their ubiquitous availability within a network of worldwide reach, they are still isolated nodes. Due to technical, legal and business constraints there is almost no interoperability between them. In this paper the interoperability between electronic markets is discussed from the technical point of view. The federated paradigm for interoperability is proposed as a possible approach and several types of federations of electronic markets are described