Information intermediation is the foundation stone of some of the most successful Internet companies, and is perhaps second only to the Internet Infrastructure companies. On the heels of information integration and interoperability, this book on information brokering discusses the next step in information interoperability and integration.
The emerging Internet economy based on burgeoning B2B and B2C trading will soon demand semantics-based information intermediation for its feasibility and success. B2B ventures are involved in the `rationalization' of new vertical markets and construction of domain specific product catalogs. This book provides approaches for re-use of existing vocabularies and domain ontologies as a basis for this rationalization and provides a framework based on inter-ontology interoperation. Infrastructural trade-offs that identify optimizations in performance and scalability of web sites will soon give way to information based trade-offs as alternate rationalization schemes come into play and the necessity of interoperating across these schemes is realized.
Information Brokering Across Heterogeneous Digital Data's intended readers are researchers, software architects and CTOs, advanced product developers dealing with information intermediation issues in the context of e-commerce (B2B and B2C), information technology professionals in various vertical markets (e.g., geo-spatial information, medicine, auto), and all librarians interested in information brokering.

List of Figurs. List of Tables. Preface. Acknowledgements. Foreword by Michael N. Huhns. 1. Introduction. 2. Metadata and Ontologies. 3. Metadata-Based Architectures. 4. Metadata-Based Brokering for Digital Data. 5. Capturing Information Content in Structured Data. 6. The Infosleuth System. 7. Vocabulary Brokering in the Observer System. 8. An Illustrative Example. 9. Related Work. 10. Conclusion. References. Index.