Unfortunately, so far electronic shopping systems have had relatively limited success in supplanting or even augmenting traditional physical and catalog shopping. Most systems offered today are proprietary structures that lack interoperability and cross navigation. Despite the growing number of companies that present their products on the Internet a global search for products is impeded by semantic differences between the offered EPCs. Thus, even though buyers enjoy broad access to different vendors' product specifications and can easily retrieve product information from all over the world, integration and evaluation of product information has to be performed manually. Typically, products are presented by each company in a different semantic context.
Buyers have to translate the semantics manually.
Especially in a global environment as diverse as the Internet where people from many different cultural backgrounds meet and a wide variety of languages is in use the issue of translation between and integration of different vocabularies is exacerbated even further. Thus, customers are continuously forced to get accustomed to new ways of interaction. In order to overcome these problems a common language for the specification of product information is needed. Under the term MEPC we understand a product catalog that semantically integrates several individual EPCs or other MEPCs into a federated system. The basic building blocks are intelligent electronic product catalogs, which are product catalogs that are augmented by a semantic interface layer.