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11523 Athens, Greece. Tel.: +30 944 866516; Fax: +30 1 6981885; E-mail:
nsak@planet.gr | Zentrum für Graphische Datenverarbeitung, 6,
Rundeturmstraße, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany. Tel.: +49 6151 155488; Fax:
+49 6151 155499; E-mail: malkewit@idg.fhg.de
Abstract: Many to many collaborative environments, often also referred to as
exchanges, are becoming more and more popular on the web. Their
common feature is that a business entity positions itself between demand and
supply, aspiring to provide for an effective bridge. In its simplest
form, the intermediary entity just provides basic supplier identification data
to any requesting user, according to the criteria the user has
specified. However, very often the operation modalities go well
beyond this elementary functionality and may lead to much more advanced and
complex business engagements. Our particular implementation of a "many to many"
collaborative environment is based on a simple, yet powerful conceptual
extension to the traditional client-server paradigm. It suggests a
three-layer model, including, besides the clients and the servers, also a
network layer, offering a set of services to the demand and supply side
alike. In the literature, we have called this architecture a hyper
chain. In this work a number of aspects of our architecture will be presented,
mainly building upon an implementation for the furniture sector that is
currently in its marketing phase as well as on other more pre-competitive
exercises that we are involved in or aware of. We will start by
reviewing the business rationale that underlies the approach. Then,
we will review the current trends in setting up successful
exchanges. To these, we will juxtapose the operational novelty of
our design. Next, we will briefly survey the building blocks of the
architecture and finally discuss some exploitation particularities of such a
service.
