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Summary: 1 INTRODUCTION
Many research projects, and current catalog
providers, have attempted to introduce IT-based
solutions to the problem of identifying manufactured
products. The majority of these projects appear to
have met with little commercial success, for which
there are a variety of identified barriers (Jain &
Augenbroe 2000). In this project a new technology,
which takes advantage of the open nature of the
Internet, is tested to ascertain its relative merits for a
manufactured product brokering service.
1.1 Current Manufactured Product Services
Manufacturers and suppliers publish a huge range of
information on their individual products and
services. Often these product sheets contain
information vital to the decisions on planned
functionality of a building and choice of product to
match specified functionality. In most western
countries there are commercial organizations which
collate a large range of product information in the
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