The RM-ODP describes an architecture which supports the distribution, interoperability and portability of software components. All participating parties in an open distributed system assume the roles of service providers and service requesters , which have no a priori knowledge about each other. In particular they are not linked statically to each other, but rather dynamically when the need arises. According to the RM-ODP a mediation process is divided into several steps. The difference with the aforementioned mediation process is, that a search engine automatically scans the Internet for potential service offers in order to build up a service database.
Search engines represent ad-hoc solutions to the general problem of service trading.
The quality of the mediated services decreases proportionally with the increasing amount of services present in the Internet. The notion of a type system is essential for the discussion of a mediation process. Furthermore a type system defines rules, which allow the association of service offer and request, both represented as type specifications. The type specification language of the RM-ODP focuses on operational aspects of a type specification, i.e. how a service is accessible from a programming point of view. Within a global system, where programmers as well as application users are exposed to the mediation process, the selection of type specifications is of equal importance.