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In this paper, we describe an architecture for an open marketplace exploiting the workflow technology and the currently emerging data exchage and metadata representation standards on the Web.In this market architecture electronic commerce is realized through the adaptable workflow templates provided by the marketplace to its users. Having workflow templates for electronic commerce processes results in a component-based architecture where components can be agents (both buying and selling) as well as existing applications invoked by the workflows. Other advantages provided by the workflow technology are forward recovery, detalied logging of the processes through workflow history manager and being able to specify data and control flow among the workflow components.In the architecture proposed, the resources expose their metadata using Resource Description Framework (RDF) to be accessed by the resource discovery agents and their content through Extensible Markup Language (XML) to be accessed by the selling agents by using Document Object Model (DOM). The common set of Document Type Definitions (DTDs) are used to eliminate the need for an ontology.The marketplace contains an Intelligent Directory Service (IDS) which makes it possible for agents to find out about each other through a match making mechanism. References to the related Document Type Definitions (DTDs) are stored in IDS. The IDS also contains the template workflows for buying and selling processes.In this paper, we describe an architecture for an open marketplace exploiting the workflow technology and the currently emerging data exchage and semantic representation standards on the Web.We have chosen the distribution infrastructure of the marketplace to be Web plus CORBA [6]. The current Web-native distributed object communication proposals like WebBroker [23] do not seem to be mature enough yet and lack the services that CORBA provides. In our implementation the CORBA methods ori the server are invoked through XML. In this way a CORBA compliant ORB is not necessary at the client side.We plan to realize the communication of agents in the system through a KQML implementation based on CORBA. As discussed in [1], CORBA provides both the transport layer and the necessary services in this respect.In the architecture proposed, the Intelligent Directory Service (IDS) contains the template workflows for buying and selling processes, as well as a match maker mechanism, Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and a dictionary of synonyms. The match maker mechanism lets agents find out about each other. Using the common set of DTDs eliminate the need for an ontology. The dictionary of synonyms is used by the buying processes to help the customer to specify the item s/he wishes to purchase.In this architecture, resource discovery agents of IDS working in the background discover resources. If a resource is willing to join the marketplace, the IDS sends a selling workflow template to the seller's site. The resource creates a selling process by automatically customizing the temp...

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