Digiket: decentralized architecture for worldwide electronic market

Proposes a new decentralized architecture for electronic markets, called Digiket (DIGItal marKET), as an alternative to traditional virtual malls. The present Internet commerce consists of relatively small closed markets; so, new frameworks that enable Web-based stores and malls to share their services worldwide are strongly desired. Digiket separates electronic commerce functions (such as content authoring, catalog delivery, intermediary services, shopping assistants and transaction processing) from traditional mall sites, and decentralizes each of them independently. Digiket's architecture is unique in that it requires no central coordinators for the distributed components. Instead, the PCO (Portable Compound Object) language, a lingua franca for Digiket, connects the components to each other. We have also implemented the PCO language and a user agent client named OpenBasket, to demonstrate a shopping application on Digiket. The demonstration shows that a consumer can order arbitrary goods described in PCO without vendor barriers.