The U.S. Department of Commerce has awarded a $5 million contract to CommerceNet, CN Group, Tesserae Information Systems, and Stanford-based BizBot to extend CommerceNet's eCo System--an object-oriented framework to combine Web services and resources for e-commerce. The project seeks to let Internet commerce software interoperate with EDI (electronic data interchange), OBI (Open Buying on the Internet), OMG's Common Business Objects, and Microsoft's value chain initiative.