Shopping Models: A Flexible Architecture for Information Commerce

Abstract

In a digital library, there are many different interaction models between customers and information providers or merchants. Subscriptions, sessions, pay-per-view, shareware, and pre-paid vouchers are different models that each have different properties. A single merchant may use several of them. Yet if a merchant wants to support multiple models, there is a substantial amount of work to implement each one. In this paper, we formalize the shopping models which represent these different modes of consumer to merchant interaction. In addition to developing the overall architecture, we define the application program interfaces (API) to interact with the models. We show how a small number of primitives can be used to construct a wide range of shopping models that a digital library can support, and provide examples of the shopping models in operation, demonstrating their flexibility.