Distributed object-oriented schema for XML-based electronic catalog sharing semantics among businesses

The Internet commerce increases the demands of service integrations by sharing XML-based catalogs. We propose the PCO data model supporting semantic inheritance to ensure the synonymy of heterogeneous semantics among distributed schemas that different authors define independently. Also, the PCO model makes semantic relation ships independent of an initial class hierarchy, and enables rapid schema evolution across the Internet business. This preserves semantic interoperability without changing predefined classes. We have also encoded the PCO model into two XML-base languages: PCO Specification Language (PSL) and Portable Composite Language (PCL). This paper demonstrates that intermediaries defining service semantics in PSL can automatically integrate multi-suppliers' PCL catalogs for their agent-mediated services.