I need to find public references to a "Web Service Marketplace".
Particularly, I need to find any publicly available documents
regarding a "Marketplace" that enables consumers to subscribe to or
purchase Web services that are posted by an unrelated third party Web
services' provider. Specifically I am looking for documents published
or available during or before January 2003. This includes technical
papers, user manuals, photographs, marketing materials, magazines,
publications, textbooks, or commercially available products.

---

Request for Question Clarification by hedgie-ga on 06 Sep 2005 03:07 PDT

Hello Sam

 Is this question still active?
 The fact that this remained open so long  suggest that there are not
 many such references.
 I am guessing that this to determine 'prior art; for a patent application,
 either to show patent not valid or to deal with prior art.
(Such as this one.
http://uk.builder.com/architecture/web/0,39026570,39258818,00.htm
)
 If I am right (and you will be happy with at least one, and may be not more
 such application prior year 2000) please indicate which case are you 
 pursuing (validity or oposing validity).

 It was not called WSM, but it was clearly an instance of such use.
Hedgie

---

Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 06 Sep 2005 06:49 PDT

Samuel,

Please have a look at this Web Services Directory site -- which
definitely dates to before 2003 -- and let me know what you think:



http://www.flash-db.com/services/



It is definitely set up as a place to buy and sell web services ...
note that each service offered has a price listed with it.

The only drawback I can see is that most of the prices are listed as
"Free".  Some of the services are offered as Demos, however. 
Presumably, that means they can be accessed at no charge for a limited
time, after which, the user must pay to continue using the service.

Please let me know if there's anything in addition you need to make
for a complete answer to your question.  If there isn't, I'll be happy
to post this link -- along with some confirmation of the date of the
site -- as a formal answer.


Thanks,

pafalafa-ga

---

Clarification of Question by samuel17158-ga on 06 Sep 2005 15:19 PDT

Hedgie and Pafalafa,
Thank you for taking the time to look at my question. I am pursuing
opposing validity for a patent application. I have attached a few
examples that I have found and am hoping that they might be able to
help you find others. Here are the examples:

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-ws-arch-scenarios-20020730/#S030
section: 2.8.2 (July 30, 2002)
2. http://www.webservicesarchitect.com/content/articles/irani07.asp
3. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-arc6/

Thanks in advance,
Sammy

Hello there, Sammy.

Thanks for providing those additional links...they were a big help.


I think you will find that there are several concrete examples -- in
addition to the ones you found already -- of descriptions of a web
service marketplace that are dated January 2003 or earlier.  Some of
them are right on the money, while others are a bit more tangential
(or not described in great detail), but I've included them all here to
add to the weight of evidence regarding your prior art query.

Here are the key examples I identified:




=============== 


http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=2287

Epicentric will launch Web Services Marketplace

Epicentric Unveils Web Services E-Hub

March 21, 2001


...Epicentric, a San Francisco-based company that develops and deploys
e-business portals, has officially launched its Web Services
Marketplace...The new e-marketplace provides users with a library of
support information for building and maintaining Web services,
including best practices, FAQs, tutorials, code samples and discussion
boards. Customers can also search a catalog of Web services including
industry-specific Web services for vertical markets.


=====


The Epicentric Web Services Marketplace is described in considerable
detail in this archived page from their website, dated March 31, 2001.
 The service includes purchase options for Epicentric services, as
well as a component for selling third-party services:


http://web.archive.org/web/20010404230735/www.epicentric.com/solutions/mkt.jsp

Web Services Marketplace 

The Epicentric Web Services Marketplace is a global e-business center
designed to serve Epicentric's growing network of customers and
partners. The Epicentric Web Services Marketplace features the
interactive community and resources needed to purchase and exchange
Web services for use with Epicentric powered e-business networks and
to collaborate and develop Web services and modules using the
Epicentric platform.

Features of the Epicentric Web Services Marketplace include:

Store 
The Store is designed for the purchase and license of Epicentric
produced and/or recommended Web services and modules. In the Store you
will find a complete and current list of Epicentric's available Web
services.



Exchange
The Exchange features listings of third-party produced and supported
Web services and modules. Join Epicentric in co-marketing and selling
your services to our extensive e-business network community.


===============

[This paper is undated -- and obtusely academic -- but I at least
wanted you to be aware of it, even if it is of only marginal value]


http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/p49-tolksdorf.html

A Web Service Market Model based on Dependencies

ABSTRACT
The construction of composite Web Services from service fragments
requires semantic descriptions of service offers and service requests.
We propose the use of dependencies as a modeling concept to describe
service requests and service offers and outline a Web Service Market,
that constructs composite services, offered by a temporary network of
economically independent service providers, by resolving dependencies
based on coordination theory.



4. Conclusion
In our work we capture the semantic characteristics of Web Services
offers and requests using a set of dependencies. We described a
marketplace to construct executable service flows by resolving
dependencies. The modeling with dependencies makes it possible to
match process parts on different abstraction/specialization levels.
Secondly we stress the role of trust-enabling services in the market
architecture and develop a framework for integrating different trust
mechanisms.


=============== 


 		
http://www.ntt.com/release_e/news02/0010/1008.html
October 8, 2002
 
  
NTT Com to Launch Asia's First UDDI Registry on October 9

 
...NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) announced today that on
October 9 it will launch Asia's first UDDI Business Registry1
(www.ntt.com/uddi/) based on the Universal Description, Discovery and
Integration (UDDI) specifications, joining IBM, Microsoft and SAP in
providing a completely open public registry with a standard access
method for companies to register their services and search for
business partners' services online.

...As part of registering its own services in the registry, NTT Com
plans to develop new business-to-business (B2B) Web Services2 and
thereby establish the company as a new leader in this field.


=============== 



http://www.flash-db.com/services/

http://web.archive.org/web/20020817141222/http://www.flash-db.com/services/
2002-08-16


The Flash-db Web Services Directory

Overview: The Flash-db Web Services directory is a place to discover
new web services and find detailed descriptions of their usage. This
directory is unique in that all of the clients listed for services
where designed in the SWF file format (flash). This offers a unique
way to consume, distribute, and display dynamic content from various
services.


=============== 



http://www.networkworld.com/news/2000/0313apps.html

Bowstreet boosts B2B software
Network World, 03/13/2000 


...Bowstreet will launch its Business Web Exchange, an online
community for companies offering Web services based on Bowstreet's
technology. The exchange will feature a free version of Bowstreet's
Marketplace Edition software that supports up to 10 users as well as
moderated forums for business-to-business Web site developers. The
company already has signed up 20 Web service publishers to offer their
wares on the exchange, but officials plan to have hundreds of
publishers listed eventually.

..."With the Business Web Exchange, companies can take their core
competencies and put them in a box so that other businesses can find
them," explains Steve Chazin, senior product marketing manager at
Bowstreet. Examples of services that companies might want to offer on
the site include package tracking, insurance quotes and mortgage loan
rates, he adds.

...The exchange is "a great Trojan horse," Hurwitz says. "In these
days, where it's hard to get the attention of the marketplace,
companies are finding that being able to give somebody a taste test of
your product's features is a good way to allow people to understand
what you're doing."


======

[More on Bowstreet from their archived website from 2001] 



http://web.archive.org/web/20010219033902/http://www.bowstreet.com/news/press_releases/b2b_revolution.htm

...The Bowstreet? Business Web Exchange fuels B2B revolution with
first-of-its-kind "web services" marketplace

...Bowstreet' Business Web Exchange, an open Internet community where
companies can find, acquire and customize other companies' "web
services" from the Exchange, as well as publish web services to it to
build their businesses in ways they never imagined.

...The Bowstreet Business Web Exchange is prompting the most
significant transformation in the software industry in 30 years.
Bowstreet is transforming the World Wide Web from a collection of
hard-wired web sites into a dynamic and fluid web of interconnected
businesses. Companies will form instant B2B web connections to sell
products they've never sold before in ways they've never imagined to
customers they never knew existed. Multi-company "business webs" will
turn the Internet into "the" medium for commerce, not just an
intriguing alternative.



===============


http://www.webservicesarchitect.com/content/editorial/20010704.asp
July 04 2001

...what will the Web Services landscape look like in a few years time,
once the dust has settled? Will it be dominated by a small number of
big players, perhaps led by Microsoft, selling their wares to the rest
of the world much as they do today, or a more differentiated,
distributed model, wherein any number of smaller companies make their
services available to businesses in a free B2B marketplace?


===============


Primordial Releases Industry's First Product Designed to Manage
Consumption of Web Services

http://lair.xent.com/pipermail/fork/2001-November/006569.html

WSBANG! - Web Services Broker and Network Gateway 

Oct. 17, 2001


...Leading Web services consultancy Primordial today
announced the release of WSBANG! 1.0, an SNMP-compliant Web services
proxy designed to help IT organizations master the paradigm shift
towards Web services.

...WSBANG! - pronounced "WHIZ-bang" - gives IT central control over Web
services consumption policies, as well as providing significant
value-adds. It plugs into corporate networks and provides caching,
monitoring, metering, micropayment tracking, reporting, and security and
encryption. It allows IT managers to set Web services policy centrally
and enforce it consistently across the enterprise


===============



As you can see, it's quite a mixed bag of early information pertaining
to web services marketplace tools.  Nonetheless, when combined with
the links you already have, I think these would collectively give you
a good overview of the pre-2003 activity in this area.


I trust this information fully answers your question.

However, please do not rate this answer until you have everything you
need.  If there's anything more I can do for you, just post a Request
for Clarification, and I'm at your service.

Cheers,

pafalafa-ga



search strategy -- Searched Google, and several newspaper databases, for:

 [ "web services"  market-place OR marketplace OR broker OR
intermediary 1997..2002 ]

Hi again Sammy

I pleased to see that I guessed right. 
(hint for the next time: it always helps us to know as much as
possible about the purpose of the question).
My colleague Pfafala-ga  did post good set of the links, and may be
that's all you need (?).

 Now I know if some links I collected in the meantime would be useful,
or if I should just throw them out.
 I would post here just few, and if you want more, you may ask for more.

1) Origin of the term WS 'Web Services'


" And anecdotal evidence does suggest that the two words, Web
services, were in fact first uttered in this context by Microsoft
chairman Bill Gates at the Microsoft Professional Developers
Conference in Orlando, Fla., July 12, 2000.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010928S0006

   So, before this date, we had these activities, connected to the acronym soup of

CORBA, SOAP,  OASIS Standard. UDDI ...

which all tried to accomplish (and did) the same goal: creating
application interoperable
over range of different OS, platform, and machines.

2) So, answer depends on how broadly one defines the term 'Web Services'

In broad sense, it started with the Internet - which
 1) used IP  (Internet Protocol)
 2) had as one goal creation of network of heterogeneous machines

which is the technical definition of WS
Exactly What Are Web Services?
http://archive.devx.com/javaSR/articles/binstock/binstockp.asp

So, there was a continuing process, from the beginning of the Internet
to now, of solutions to the 
 

This magazine is documenting this progress since  1995 to now
http://www.cutter.com/webservices/2003toc.html

 I sincerely hope that this few links may help you to stem the 
 tide of attempts to monopolies the chunks of the natural and obvious
web functions.

I have few more 'origin' articles which connect CORBA and SOAP to the term WS
really - only thing which is new here is the buzz word .

Hedgie