Resumen
In the article, authors say that the information superhighway in its incarnation as the Internet has the inherent potential of enabling a global marketplace. Electronic product catalogs (EPCs) form the Web-based front end to this rapidly evolving marketplace. Despite the growing number of companies that present their products on the Internet, a global search for products and comparative analysis of their features is impeded by semantic differences between the EPCs. Especially in a global environment as diverse as the Internet, where people from many different cultural backgrounds meet and a wide variety of languages are in use, the issue of translation between and integration of different vocabularies, is exacerbated even further. Search engines available on the Internet today are of little help as they are practically all based on classic models of information retrieval that work on a strictly syntactic basis. Drawing from the information repositories of mediating electronic product catalogs, differentiation services can be established.