Information and entertainment service providers offering their services on the Internet quite often require a broker (or third-party) to facilitate commercial transactions. A common framework is required for this third-party marketplace, where a number of suppliers offer their goods and services to a range of potential buyers. Generally, the operator of such a marketplace plays the role of a neutral broker, providing common facilities such as catalogue hosting, order handling and payment processing, as well as security services such as authentication and non-repudiation. With a wide range of offers from many suppliers, the broker has then the problem of structuring and organising such offers so as to ease the buyer's task of locating the best offer. Traditional ways of classifying goods are proving inadequate for this sort of environment and normal Web search engines cannot handle the problem. A further complication is that the way in which goods are categorised depends entirely on the categoriser. In a multi-vendor marketplace a broker will therefore have to cope with large numbers of completely different category systems.

This issue was addressed by the ACTS project COBRA. The lead partner Onyx developed a tool for managing different category systems, which can then be interlinked. As well as being used to handle categorisation of business-related information in two of the COBRA trials, this tool formed a major component of Onyx's business-to-business e-commerce marketplace service 'Tradezone', which has now entered commercial trials. The Tradezone user interface allows the user to navigate a catalogue of offers via a dynamic tree view created from the category system defined for the catalogue. The COBRA tool allows Onyx to manage its own global category space, providing access to the Tradezone global catalogue, as well as offering each Tradezone supplier its own category space, where it can choose how to wishes to structure and present its offers to the buyers. A future version of Tradezone will provide buying organisations with access to the category management service, enabling them to create their own categorisations of the offers that they are interested in. This will allow them to take on more of the brokerage role themselves and is of particular interest to large purchasing organisations, many of whom are already planning to operate their own intranet catalogues.

The launch of Tradezone marked a major milestone in Onyx's move into electronic commerce, ant it aims to extend Tradezone into a global e-commerce network. This global objective was emphasised by changeing the company name to Tradezone International Ltd. Involvement in the COBRA project has brought direct and immediate benefits to Onyx and helped in improving the processes (and hence reduce the costs) of buying and selling for the growing number of Tradezone users.

The COBRA system for multimedia service brokering was also used an integral part of service platform of the Helsinki Arena 2000 initiative. Helsinki Arena 2000 and its advanced broadband network service form the infrastructure of the future community network for inhabitants of the Helsinki district and is an excellent platform for building new multimedia services. High technology solutions based on, for example 3D modelling of the city, and advanced communication services such as videophone, are all characteristic of Helsinki Arena 2000.

The Helsinki Telephone Corporation (HPY) provides users with access to an increasing number of multimedia services over its Internet and IP/ATM based broadband networks. HPY, its customers and other service providers publish new multimedia services constantly. The rich variety of new services is setting new requirements for multimedia service publishing and marketing, as well as for multimedia service management and user support. In the COBRA project HPY ran a pilot on multimedia service brokerage. The target was to develop a service for assisting end-users to find and use advanced multimedia services. By providing a appropriate marketing and publication platform for them, including the necessary service management facilities, the pilot helped multimedia service providers to meet their customers' needs.

As a result of another COBRA trial, staff in the Information and Advisory Service of the Milan Chamber of Commerce now have a more direct connection with sources of information. This helps them to provide or access advice more quickly and at lower cost, and to work together more efficiently to handle requests for assistance. The result has been a marked improvement of the value-added information services provided by the Chamber. It plans to replicate its model for information brokerage services for business (the 'EIC model') and recommend it, together with the set of tools, procedures and knowledge provided by COBRA, to other Italian Chambers.It has therefore set up a specific project to export the EIC model. The aim is to create a new feedback loop so that Chambers using the same brokerage architecture and tools can easily exchange experiences. The same approach is already in place between the Milan Chamber and the partners of the 'CLUB of Major European Chambers' (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan and Paris).