Openbasket: a pick-and-droppable shopping agent placing orders to multiple electronic storefronts

We propose a new shopping client, named Openbasket, to place orders to multiple merchants on the Internet. The feature of Openbasket is to integrate heterogeneous shopping services through XML-based catalog and messaging. For this purpose, we have been developed a new commerce modeling language, Portable Composite Language (PCL). Using Openbasket and PCL, the consumer can freely select PCL catalogs from any Web sites, and can place orders of them using unified user interfaces through PCL messaging. We address how Openbasket makes it easier for end-consumers to do shopping across the Internet.