The integration of electronic catalogs (eCatalogs) is one of the most important aspects for the successful deployment of electronic commerce systems, since they are usually the only communication channel between buyers and suppliers. In this paper, we propose an XML-based global eCatalog integration platform whose query model allows us to avoid the costly problem of finding rewritings for each local eCatalog in the system, while at the same time, providing reliable answers to a wide range of XPath queries. Our implementation relies on the following characteristics to achieve its goals: the intrinsic properties of the XPath model; the applicability' and efficiency of an extensible fitness junction used to evaluate each answer; and the hierarchical nature of product catalogs.
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