| Abstract
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The Internet provides dramatic new opportu … The Internet provides dramatic new opportunities for gathering information from multiple, distributed, heterogeneous information sources. However, this distributed environment poses difficult technical problems for the information-seeking client, including finding the information sources relevant to an interest, formulating questions in the terms that the sources understand, interpreting the retrieved information, and assembling the information retrieved from several sources into a coherent answer. In this paper, we describe techniques that will enable vendors and buyers to build and maintain network-based information brokers capable of retrieving information about services and products via the Internet from multiple vendor catalogs and data bases for both human and computer-based clients. for both human and computer-based clients.
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