Over the years, our computing lifestyles have changed. Today, everyone sees the value of
the Internet, and our computing lifestyle is becoming more and more dependent on Webbased
services. Personally, I love to shop, get traffic conditions, compare products, buy
tickets, and read product reviews all via the Internet.
However, I’m finding that there are still many things I’d like to do using the Internet that aren’t
possible today. For example, I’d like to find restaurants in my area that serve a particular
cuisine. Furthermore, I’d like to be able to ask if the restaurant has any seating for, say, 7:00
p.m. that night. Or if I had my own business, I might like to know which vendor has a
particular item in stock. If multiple vendors can supply me with the item, I’d like to be able to
find out which vendor offers the least expensive price for the item or maybe which vendor
can deliver the item to me the fastest.
Services like these don’t exist today for two main reasons. The first reason is that no
standards are in place for integrating all this information. After all, vendors today each have
their own way of describing what they sell. The emerging standard for describing all types of
information is Extensible Markup Language (XML). The second reason these services don’t
exist today is the complexity of developing the code necessary to integrate such services.