Electronic Commerce involves coordination between different organizations using communication technology. The coordination can be achieved in the form of an electronic market or a virtual enterprise. In both cases, contracts play a central role. In the Electronic Market, contracts are agreements on a specific business transaction. In a Virtual Enterprise, the contract is a cooperation agreement for a longer period involving integrated business processes. A general framework of business communication is presented that is applied to a case study. We argue that an agent society model is most suitable for implementing contracts.
Infomediation refers to a virtual space where the buyers and sellers can meet, negotiate, and form business relationships. We describe an infomediary-based approach that uses a semantic model to define the information space. Along with the semantic model, we employ an ontology that enables semantic data integration. XML is an emerging standard data format for cross-platform information exchange—our architecture leverages the power of XML to facilitate information exchange. Using these techniques, we are developing a web-based tool to integrate participants in an electronic marketplace. Our approach supports interoperability between loosely coupled virtual partners and enables customization of information for multiple users and devices.
The World Wide Web provides access to a great deal of information on a vast array of subjects. A user can begin a search for information by selecting a Web page and following the embedded links from page to page looking for clues to the desired information. An alternative method is to use one of the Web-based search engines to select the Web pages that refer to the general subject of the information desired. In either case, a vast amount of information is retrieved. The quantity can be overwhelming, and much of the information may be marginally relevant or completely irrelevant to the user's request.We present a methodology, architecture, and proof-of-concept prototype for query construction and results analysis that provides the user with a ranking of choices based on the user's. determination of importance. The user initially designs the query with assistance from the user's profile, a thesaurus, and previously constructed queries acting as a taxonomy of the information requirements. After the query has returned its results, decision analytic methods and information source reliability information are used in conjunction with the expanded taxonomy to rank the solution candidates.
We propose an Interorganizational Knowledge Mediation Scheme (IKMS) acting as an information infrastructure for B2B solutions for aggregating exchange information supplied by the companies participating in a trading community in order to support e-business processes. The proposed IKMS is a set of mediated descriptions of exchange information at the global level, defined as global X-classes, and relies on a set of techniques for building such global X-classes.
We propose a web notary system to support privacy keeping E-Commerce over the Internet. A web notary system can be seen as a trusted third-party enhanced with value-added services. With a web notary system, customers can provide privacy protected information and requests to the system instead to various on-line shops. The system can then search its information repository in an intelligent way on behalf of the customers and provide personalized services. In this paper, we develop a novel privacy control model based on hierarchy of privacy groups. We also design a method for efficient customer-provider matchmaking. A prototype system has been developed to demonstrate our proposals.
The requirement for secure e-commerce transactions arises due to the potentially hostile execution environment where not only hardware can fail, but also the messages are subject to attacks by intruders, and some parties may suffer from negligent or even malicious behaviors of some other parties. Most of the existing work paid attention only to message security. In this paper, we propose a secure e-commerce transaction model. We focus our attention on modeling the security aspects at the transaction level, and discuss the properties an e-commerce transaction protocol must have in order to support the semantics of the transactions. The semantics we use is based in the first instance on the notion of atomicity proposed in [13], and then extended to a broader context where the behaviors of untrustworthy players are taken into consideration.
Most conceptual Web design methods proposed so far focus on browsing (i.e. inquiry tasks) but it is not clear how to integrate them with transactional tasks which have a lasting effect. Moreover, tasks are commonly integrated into higher-order behavioural units: the processes. For instance, the process of a purchase includes "browsing the catalog", "adding to the trolley", "filling up billing data" and other tasks that end up in the fulfillment of the order. We claim that these distinct task types (i.e. inquiry and transactional tasks) impose different demands and require distinct skills from the designer. On these grounds, we envisage a bottom-up approach to web application construction. First, inquiry and transactional task design is conducted by two separate teams each with expertise in one area. Second, processes are realised through inter-task dependencies. Declarative and separate description of tasks and dependencies accounts for maintenability of the whole solution. This paper presents how this approach has been realised in AtariX, a tool environment for the specification and support of web applications. Transactional tasks reside in the middle-tier implemented as Enterprise Java-Beans whereas both inquiry tasks and inter-tasks dependencies axe regulated at the Web server.
This paper examines the nature and characteristics of the ownership relationship between objects in an object-oriented database. The ownership relationship is distinguished from the Part-Whole relationship since these two axe often confused. Dimensions of the ownership relationship are detailed and described with clarifying examples from the financial securities markets. These dimensions are: 1) exclusiveness, 2) dependency, 3) limitation, 4) status, 5) settlement, 6) documentation and 7) inheritance. Formal definitions of the dimensions of the ownership relationship are sketched out for the purpose of extending current Object-Oriented Database Models (OODBs).
The inexpensive and global connectivity provided by the Internet has triggered a wave of interest in providing service-oriented electronic access to commercial activities. This pressure has led, in turn, to a need for accurate service description, so that we may advertise, locate, analyse and compare services. In this paper, we classify services by the context in which they are used. Next, we characterise both conventional and electronic services according to a range of domain independent attributes including price, payment method and availability. We examine possible representations for each of these service dimensions. By integrating these representations into a unified service description language, we hope to provide a means to lubricate the electronic services marketplace.
As a result of the explosive growth of the Internet in the recent years, the number of vendors offering online storefronts has grown tremendously. All these vendors offer potential buyers the ability to browse their online catalogs, identify items to purchase, and then complete the purchase transaction. A relatively new phenomenon in e-commerce is the need to integrate multiple individual e-catalogs into a single, unified catalog. This need is driven by the recent proliferation of online malls, business-to-business exchanges, and mergers and acquisitions. The integration of e-catalogs presents a variety of problems, such as resolving semantic conflicts between catalogs dealing with a variety of product structures and classifications, etc. In this paper, we lay the fundamental groundwork required for solving the e-catalog integration problem by proposing a model to support e-catalog integration. A model is developed to formally define a single e-catalog. It is then extended to model an integrated view over a number of vendor catalogs. The paper lays an infrastructure and suggests an approach to deal with the important practical problem of integrating existing e-catalogs.
The increasing growth in size and complexity of portals calls for a systematic way to web-application development that is able to face the stringent demands imposed on both the development and maintenance of these systems. Model-based approaches have been proposed to mitigate this situation. These approaches aim to find models, preferably orthogonal, that allow designers to declaratively specify a distinct concern of the application without being immediately immersed in details of implementations. This paper presents AtariX, a model-based tool that renders HTML pages from the declarative schemata specified by the designer. Each concern is described by a separate XML document: how data is integrated and structured (the content document), the topology of links (the navigation document) and the layout of each element (the presentation document). An application is then conformed by a set of schemata (i.e. model instances), for each of the distinct models. Separation of concerns and declarativeness enhance the application maintenability, as well as promoting concurrent development as each model can be assigned to a different team. AtariX has been fully implemented and its use is illustrated by designing and delivering a website for a scientific conference.
With the emergence of business to business eCommerce conventional trading practices need to be adapted to the new electronic environment. One such trading practice is the call for tender (CFT) which is heavily used for trading perishable goods. A naive translation of the CFT to mediated eCommerce introduces new manipulation possibilities like identity masquerading, repudiation of messages etc. In a first step, we show how the basic CFT can be made robust against these security attacks. However, this approach does not eliminate fundamental economic design problems of the CFT itself. In a second step, we show how the CFT can be protected against attacks that damage the fairness and economic efficiency of a market by turning it into a secure seated-bid auction protocol.
Dynamic establishment of electronic service contracts necessitates the dynamic configuration of a contract enactment system to either perform or consume the service. The more complex a service is, the more likely it is to be enacted by several components (or subsystems). Flexible configuration of a contract enactment system from components requires a blueprint defining which component type plays which role in the service's enactment and how components are parameterised with contract elements. For this specification we need to understand the semantics of the contract and of the available components as well as rules for a correct composition of components. We investigate how components can be configured and dynamically assembled and propose an extensible service enactment model that provides the basis for component assembly. On the basis of this model the Internal Enactment Specification language is introduced for describing component compositions and parameterisations that can be processed by an automatic configuration mechanism.
The information left behind by users who have visited a web site is recorded in the related web server log files. From analysing the data contained in such files, a web designer is able to understand the interaction between the users and a web site, and then to improve the web topology. We assume that the information of web usage can be generated from log files via a cleaning process, from which we identify a set of navigation sessions that represent the trails formed by users during the navigation process. The trails are modelled as a weighted directed graph, called a transition graph, and then a corresponding navigation matrix is computed with respect to the underlying web topology. The main contribution in this paper is that we formally define a minimal set of binary operators on navigation matrices, which consists of the sum, union, intersection and difference operators. These operations afford us the ability to analyse users navigation from the contents of two given navigation matrices.
In an e-commerce or e-service environment, workflow involves not only a single organization but also a number of business partners. Workflow inter-operability is therefore an important issue for workflow enactment in such an environment. In this paper, we propose the use of workflow views as a fundamental support for workflow inter-operability and for visibility by external parties. We present taxonomy of workflow views, discuss various components of a workflow view, and their semantics with example usage. We also demonstrate how contracts can be facilitated with a supply-chain example.
We propose ways to discover semantic relationships among Web pages, andits applications in Web search, such as detailed-of, simplified-of, similar-topic-of, different-topic-of relationships. In order to discover those semantic relationships, we propose two methods: One is based on ‘topic structures’ of Web pages. A topic structure of a Web page is computed by the combination of the term-appearancedensity-distribution of each page and the term co-occurrence ratio for all the term-pairs in all retrieved pages. The other is based on the ‘inclusion’ relationships among feature vectors of Web pages. We describe both of their algorithms and their evaluations.
In the point of view of copyright, license agreements are required for proper reuse of web contents. In this paper, a new license agreement model and a licensing system for reuse of web contents are proposed. With this model and system, both providers and users of web contents can find the point of compromise to make license agreements dynamically. The system responds to users' requests and generates license agreements according to the directives, which are registered by providers. In order to adjust the directives, providers can search requested conditions and agreed conditions of users. On the other hand, when users search for available contents for reuse, three independent conditions of search are combined: 1) substance of content, 2) allowed use conditions, and 3) license fee. In this paper, the prototype licensing system is also described.
Electronic business-to-business marketplaces mediate between many online suppliers and buyers, each of which can potentially use his own format to represent the products in his product catalog. The marketplaces have to perform non-trivial translations between these formats. In this paper we analyze the problems which occur during the integration, taking several leading XML and non-XML formats as examples. We discuss how the XSL-T technology can be applied to perform such type of transformation, provide the corresponding examples, highlighting the problems, and propose typical solutions to these problems.
We show how quantified constraints expressed in a sub-language of first-order logic, against a shared data model that is free to evolve, provide an excellent way of transporting domain-specific semantics along with the data. In this form it can be processed automatically by various intelligent components, instead of requiring human intervention. It can also be combined with other constraints, by algebraic transformation against a common data model, and then passed to an appropriate solver. These techniques have been tested in a classic e-business application scenario: configuring a product from parts selected from e-vendors’ catalogues, whilst conforming to requirements specific to the parts, expressed as mobile constraints.
This paper provides an overview of the Integration Rules (IRules) approach to the interconnection of distributed software components. The intended use of this rule processing technology is for the specification of event-based processing logic in the development of component-based applications for distributed environments, such as E-commerce applications. The IRules approach builds upon the use of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) software component model, providing an environment to facilitate the integration of black-box software components. An application integrator uses the Mules Component Definition Language to extend the definition of an EJB component in the IRules environment with derived and stored attributes, externalized relationships, and events.. The application integrator then uses the IRules Integration Rule Language together with a scripting language to develop applications. Integration rules provide active rule capability to the environment so that as distributed components and external sources generate event notifications, integration rules are used to invoke methods on components or on higher-level application transactions. The Mules approach is unique in that it addresses the language and semantic framework needed in the context of software component models for the effective use of rules in distributed environments.
