Automated Trading across E-Market Boundaries

Online trading has become an important topic in research and general public. As current trading platforms like eBay or Amazon usually require human interaction, these platforms haver several drawbacks when the trading process is completely automated using software agents. This paper outlines the conceptual design of architecture including necessary protocols enabling agents to automatically select market platforms, submit bids, and finally receive agreements. Achieving this, technologies derived from the Web service community are combined with the Montreal Taxonomy as a negotiation classification schema.