1、附录外文资料翻译 英文原文 A platform for communicating construction material information between e-commerce systems16 E-commerce systems are becoming increasingly important in the Hong Kong construction material procurement market. Currently， however, many e-trading marketplaces have been developed, owned, and/
2、or hosted by different companies. Each of the e-trading marketplaces forms a closed system with their unique customers and clients. The totality of these e-trading marketplaces appears to be islands in the sea, as they are isolated with no interoperation between them. Since material information in e
3、ach e-trading marketplace is limited，buyers usually cannot find all the required materials from one marketplace. This paper introduces a platform ， named E-Union, that enables interoperation between e-trading marketplaces. The ability of marketplaces to interoperate extends the idea of liquidity and
4、 network effect by joining more buyers with more suppliers， without sacrificing the ability of each marketplace to be highly specific to the supply-chain node or target buyer group it serves This paper first discusses problems in a non-interoperable E-commerce marketplace environment. Then two appro
5、aches for enabling interoperation between marketplaces ， the mobile agent approach and the Web services approach， are introduced The third part presents the concept, system architecture and functions of the E-Union platform 1 Problems in Non-Interoperable E-Trading Marketplace Environment The Web-ba
6、sed e-trading marketplace contains two major functions ： providing trading information and facilitating trading transactions. Users may log into the system as either buyers or sellers of construction materials. Sellers can upload their product information and find out summary information about their
7、 customers and their transactions. Buyers can search certain types of products，providing requirements such as brand， model, quality, price，etc.， or they can browse the products on display. When the products requested by a buyer are found， the information will be displayed to the buyer and the contac
8、t information of an agent closest to the buyers location will also be sent to the buyer. The buyer can negotiate with the agent about the price， or send an order to the agent by completing some forms online. If the user could not find the desired products， the system will keep the inquiry in storage
9、 for access by the sellers. In recent years， several other construction e-trading sites have appeared on the Web. They are operated by different organizations and attract different client groups They specialize in trading materials from suppliers in different regions. From time to time, however， cli
10、ents of one e-trading system would like to buy materials that are not available in that system but are offered on other sites. One way to solve this problem is to let the client register with several e-trading marketplaces and search these sites one by one. The variety and heterogeneity of different
11、 e-trading sites create problems for material purchasers. Finding materials in these sites requires material purchasers to acquire and maintain a list of web addresses, to interpret and understand the semantics and navigation methods in different sites， and to integrate product information in these
12、sites for evaluation manually. These kinds of material finding jobs can be time consuming and the material purchaser is required to keep abreast of new e-trading sites as they come online To provide better value-added services to the clients，the concept of E-Union is presented by linking together re
13、levant e-trading marketplaces so that cooperation between the e-trading marketplaces can be facilitated. In the e-trading union, when an e-trading site does not have the material requested by one of its registered clients， the site will send a request to other e-trading sites in the union. The remot
14、e e-trading site will treat the request as one from an associated client. An associated client cannot directly make use of the service of the e-trading marketplace as its registered client. When the material requested is found, the remote site will inform the requesting e-trading site, which will de
15、cide whether to submit an order on behalf of its client. Once a deal is made between the two e-trading sites， the requesting site will inform the remote site of the contact information of an agent to whom the material should be delivered. It will also display the material information to the buyer al
16、ong with the contact information of the agent closest to the buyers location. The remote e-trading site will charge some extra amount of money， usually a certain percentage of the normal price, for providing the service 2 Approaches for Enabling Interoperation between E-Trading Marketplaces Since in
17、dividual e-trading systems are developed based on different computational architectures， platforms and software, it is not a trivial task to make them interoperable. Several issues need to be addressed in order to realize the e-Union concept. The first issue is how an individual e-trading system fin
18、ds the service from other sites and communicates with each other. The second issue is how systems understand the various kinds of data from other systems， such as the query， order， and product information. Specifically，the data may be in different formats and databases for representation and storage. This section discusses two approaches for achieving interoperation between e-trading marketplaces， the mobile agent approach and the Web services approach
