WS-CatalogNet: An Infrastructure for Creating, Peering, and Querying e-Catalog Communities Karim Baïna, Boualem Benatallah, Hye-Young Paik, Farouk Toumani, Christophe Rey, Agnieszka Rutkowska, and Bryan Harianto   View Paper (PDF)   Return to DEMO GROUP 4: WEB AND WEB-SERVICES Abstract Given that e-catalogs are often autonomous and heterogeneous, effectively integrating and querying them is a delicate and time-consuming task. More importantly, the number of e-catalogs to be integrated and queried may be large and continuously changing. We present the WS-CatalogNet system: a Web services based information sharing middleware infrastructure whose aims is to enhance the potential of e-catalogs by focusing on scalability and flexible aspects of their sharing and access. WS-CatalogNet builds upon lessons learned in our previous work on Web information integration in order to provide a peer-to-peer and semantic-based e-catalogs sharing middleware infrastructure through which: (i) e-catalogs can be categorized and described using domain ontologies, (ii) heterogeneous service ontologies can be linked via peer relationships, (iii) e-catalogs selection caters for flexible matching between user queries and e-catalogs descriptions. ©2005 Association for Computing Machinery