E-Commerce and Web Technologies

The paper begins by defining different kinds of virtual enterprises and the kinds of support needed to make them sustainable. The paper identifies three requirements must be satisfied. These are technology that supports interaction across distance, a favorable organizational culture and the desire to share knowledge. All must be present to result in sustainable virtual organizations. Thus participants in such organizations must be willing to share knowledge, be encouraged to do so by their work environment and have suitable services provided by technologies for this purpose. The paper concludes with some examples of research questions that need to be addressed.

One variant of the Dutch auction roughly corresponds to a multi-unit, progressively ascending, uniform price, lowest winning bid, open auction. The overall revenue realized by the auctioneer in such an auction is given by R = Q × pw where, Q is the number of units of the item being auctioned, and pw is the lowest winning bid price at the end of the auction. R is only dependent on pw(Q being fixed) and an interesting question is whether it is possible to increase R.Proposed in this paper is a method for increasing pw (and consequently R). Given that the maximum bid that a bidder places reflects his or her valuation, our method relies on increasing the valuation of those bidders whose valuations are in close proximity to the lowest winning bid price. We propose achieving this objective through the use of a coupon, which is introduced at an algorithmically determined time during the auction, and which, if introduced, assumes a non-decreasing face value. The coupon can be used by all participants—the price paid by participants with winning bids utilizing the coupon is discounted by the face value of the coupon at the end of the auction process. Assuming other things are equal, participants with bids at or near the lowest winning bid price during the auction are more likely to use the coupon and increase their bids by an amount in excess of their valuation (the excess being recovered through the use of the coupon) thereby creating additional competition and potentially increasing pw.We present an algorithm that determines, based on present auction dynamics, if a coupon should be introduced, the initial face value of it, and possible subsequent revisions of the coupon face value. We also present a simple example to illustrate the algorithmic steps and illustrate the increase in R that results as a consequence of the proposed methodology.

This paper presents new multi-agent negotiation models for electronic commerce. These models address M-N-P negotiation problems, i.e. negotiations between m buyers and n sellers for buying p dependent products or services. These products or services are not necessarily provided by the same seller. We propose two new negotiation protocols as well as algorithms describing the behaviors of seller and buyer agents.

Electronic Exchanges are double-sided marketplaces that allows multiple buyers to trade with multiple sellers, with aggregation of demand and supply across the bids to maximize the revenue in the market. In this paper, we propose a new design approach for an one-shot exchange that collects bids from buyers and sellers and clears the market at the end of the bidding period. The main principle of the approach is to decouple the allocation from pricing. It is well known that it is impossible for an exchange with voluntary participation to be e.cient and budget-balanced. Budget-balance is a mandatory requirement for an exchange to operate in profit. Our approach is to allocate the trade to maximize the reported values of the agents. The pricing is posed as pay-off determination problem that distributes the total payo. fairly to all agents with budget-balance imposed as a constraint. We devise an arbitration scheme by axiomatic approach to solve the payoff determination problem using the added-value concept of game theory.

During the past few years, auctions have become popular in conducting trade negotiations on the Internet. The design of new auctions and other negotiation protocols has become an important topic for both, industry and academia. Traditional auction mechanisms allow price-only negotiations for which the winner determination is a computationally simple task. However, the need for new auction mechanisms that allow complex bids such as bundle bids and multi-attribute bids has been raised in many situations. The winner determination in these auctions is a computationally hard problem. The computational complexity has been a significant hurdle for the widespread use of these advanced auction models. In this paper, we will outline the auction design space and classify resource allocation algorithms along multiple dimensions. Then, we will explain the design of an object framework providing an API to different types of winner determination algorithms. This framework enables application programmers to specify buyer preferences, allocation rules and supplier offerings in a declarative manner, and solve the allocation problems without having to re-implement the computationally complex algorithms.

The importance of intermediaries in electronic commerce and also in electronic marketplaces has long been recognised in specialised literature. In this paper, we propose a web-based intermediary for e-commerce, whose main goal is to facilitate the entry of small and medium enterprises into the virtual business arena, by allowing the formation of enterprise coalitions based on the role of this intermediary, which acts as a shopping-window for their products. The main characteristics of this intermediary for e-commerce are as follows. First of all, it offers a trading area, based on product catalogues (multi-vendor ecatalogues). Secondly, SMEs are represented by a software catalogue-designer tool that leaves the definition, publication and update of catalogues of products in the hands of these enterprises. From this point of view, the intermediary represents a B2B/B2C hybrid proposal instead of the typical B2B variety of these commerce intermediaries.

E-commerce initiatives show that tourism data is one of the most accessed data in the Web. The problem is that a high number of users is rather unexperienced in Web use. The handling of tourism information systems is often a complex and time consuming process for tourists. To satisfy the tourists expectations it is inevitable to support the tourist in travel planning and decision making. Most tourism information systems offer a variety of sharp query functionalities with some relaxation mechanisms but lack in providing vague results or alternatives. To meet the tourists interests and preferences this paper presents two methodological approaches to support the tourist. The first is the case-based reasoning approach, which gives tourists answers to “what is recommended” by deriving individual travel suggestions from previous cases stored in the knowledge base. The second is a visual approach through touristic maps, which give the tourist a good impression of “what is where” to decide which of the resulting objects is located best regarding the tourists needs and interests.

A market is in equilibrium if there is no opportunity for arbitrage, ie: risk-free, or low-risk, profit. The majority of real markets are not in equilibrium. A project is investigating the market evolutionary process in a particular electronic market that has been constructed in an on-going collaborative research project between a university and a software house. The way in which actors (buyers, sellers and others) use the market will be influenced by the information available to them. In this experiment, data mining and filtering techniques are used to distil both individual signals drawn from the markets and signals from the Internet into meaningful advice for the actors. The goal of this experiment is first to learn how actors will use the advice available to them to identify arbitrage opportunities, and second how the market will evolve through entrepreneurial intervention. In this electronic market a multiagent process management system is used to manage all market transactions including those that drive the market evolutionary process.

With the rapid development of web services technology, the Internet becomes a giant programming interface and users can access and use the information via such an interface [1]. And the need on facilities for end users to achieve web task automation becomes more significant as the number of web services and online users increases. In this paper, we describe the proposed architecture of such an end-user builder called WTABuilder in a web services setting. WTABuilder makes use of the existing Web Service Oriented Architecture as the infrastructure [2]. Our WTABuilder architecture is designed for endusers to build complex web service-based tasks and to perform the tasks automatically. This paper gives a description of the infrastructure in place and briefly explains each component involved. The preliminary design of major components in the proposed architecture is presented.

With XML rapidly gaining popularity as the standard for data exchange on the World Wide Web,a variety of XML management systems (XMLMS) are becoming available. The choice of an XMLMS is made difficult by the significant difference in the expressive power of the queries and the performance shown by these XMLMS. Most XMLMS are legacy systems (mostly relational) extended to load,query,and publish data in XML format. A few are native XMLMS and capture all the characteristics of XML data representation. This paper looks at expressive power and efficiency of various XMLMS. The performance analysis relies on the testbed provided by XOO7,a benchmark derived from OO7 to capture both data and document characteristics of XML. We present efficiency results for two native XMLMS,an XML-enabled semi-structured data management system and an XML-enabled RDBMS,which emphasize the need for a delicate balance between the data-centric and document-centric aspects of XML query processing.

In this paper we examine the state-of-the-practice of development tools for delivering personalized Web sites, i.e Web-oriented applications that collect, elaborate and use information about the site’s users to better fulfill their mission. Personalization is at the same time one of the crucial success factors of B2C applications and one of the most significant cost factors in Web application development. In this paper, we classify the dimensions of personalized Web site development, review and classify 50 tools claiming to support such development, and motivate our conclusions on the need of a different approach to the personalization design and a novel generation of personalization tools.

In this paper we propose an agent-based hierarchical clustering technique operating on both user profiles and e-commerce sites. We show,by designing a number of appealing applications,how exploitation of such hierarchies can really benefit both customers and vendors in their activity. As a support for the customer,we provide a categorization of sites of interest as she/he perceives them,and also dynamic ecommerce portal personalization. As a support for the vendor,we design a categorization of customers directly supporting knowledge discovery on customer behavior.

E-commerce systems provide Web users with different facilities such as online banking, online (window) shopping, and online auctions. However, behind the provision of these facilities are certain requirements posed by the e-commerce applications including: data consistency, concurrency, dynamic behaviour, fault tolerance and high availability. Our research identifies that traditional ACID and agent transaction models are inadequate. We propose a new approach that enforces novel transaction correctness criteria, called SACReD (Semantic Atomicity, Consistency, Resiliency, and Durability) using a new multi-agent model. Initial evaluation shows that the new approach potentially meets the aforementioned requirements of e-commerce applications.

For mobile agents to be widely accepted in a distributed environment like the Internet, performance and security issues on their use have to be addressed. In this paper, we first present a parallel dispatch model with secure dispatch route structures. This model facilitates efficient dispatching of agents in a hierarchical manner, and ensures route security by exposing minimal route information to hosts. To further enhance route robustness, we also propose a mechanism with substitute routes that can bypass temporarily unreachable hosts, dispatch agents to substitute hosts before attempting the failed hosts again. Finally, a model for distributing the load of decrypting substitute routes is presented. We also present results of both analytical and empirical studies to evaluate different models.

Within the past few years, the variety of real-time multimedia streaming services on the Internet has grown steadily. Performance of streaming services is very sensitive to traffic congestion and results very often in poor service quality on today’s best effort Internet. Reasons include the lack of any traffic prioritization mechanisms on the network level and its dependence on the cooperation of several Internet Service Providers and their reliable transmission of data packets. Therefore, service differentiation and its reliable delivery must be enforced on a business level through the introduction of service contracts between service providers and their customers. However, compliance with such service contracts is the crucial point that decides about successful improvement of the service delivery process. For that reason, an agent-based monitoring framework has been developed and introduced enabling the use of mobile agents to monitor compliance with contractual agreements between service providers and service customers. This framework describes the setup and the functionality of different kinds of mobile agents that allow monitoring of service contracts across domains of multiple service providers.

This paper discusses about electronic commerce trading merchandises having multiple and various incentives. Incentives here mean sellers’ conditions for promoting certain types of merchandises. Typical examples of incentives are discounts on not-popular items. Buyers need to compare not only prices and contents but also incentives, and know reasons why one product is expensive than others. In this paper, we introduce a framework to support selections of multiple-incentive merchandises, by representing incentives using constraints, and offering constraint search mechanism to examine and compare those incentives. A typical example of multiple-incentive merchandises is airline tickets, where various prices are supplied according to restrictions. We show how complex incentives of airline tickets can be represented as constraints and can be queried using dynamic constraint databases.

Having emerged as a standard web language, XML has become the core of e-business solution. XML is a semistructured data that is represented as graph, which is a distinctive feature compared to other data dealt withexisting database. And query is represented as regular path expression, which is evaluated by traversing each node of the graph. In XML document withDTD, the DTD may be able to provide many valuable hints on query optimization, because it has information on the structure of the document. Using signature and information from DTD, we can minimize the traverse of nodes and quickly execute the XML query of regular pathexpression fast.

The significance of modeling and measuring various attributes of the Web in part or as a whole is undeniable. In this paper, we consider the application of patterns in browsing behavior of users for predicting access to Web documents. We proposed two models for addressing our specification of the access prediction problem. The first lays out a preliminary statistical approach using observed distributions of interaccess times of individual documents in the collection. To overcome its deficiencies, we adapted a stochastic model for library circulations, i.e., Burrell’s model, that accounts for differences in mean access rates ofWeb documents. We verified the assumptions of this model with experiments performed on a server log of accesses recorded over a six month period. Our results show that the model is reasonably accurate in predicting Web page access probabilities based on the history of accesses.

The elements of an enterprise are managed more and more model-based. The state-of-the-art in the area of modelling of organisations is based on fixed metamodels. Product models are created by using product modelling environments, process models are created in business process modelling tools and organisational models are realised in personnel management tools. Web service models link these business models to information technology. They are created by using standardised languages and common ontologies. Information technology is modelled in tools supporting notions such as workflow or object-orientation. The models of the company’s strategy, goals and the appropriate measurements are described and monitored by using tools supporting management concepts such as Balanced Scorecard.Major requirements to an enterprise modelling platform are flexibility and adaptability. These are fulfilled by environments providing flexible metamodelling capabilities. The main characteristic of such environments is that the formalism of modelling—the metamodel—can be freely defined. This raises research issues on how to design, manage, distribute and use such metamodels on a syntactic as well as on a semantic level and how to integrate, run and maintain a metamodelling platform in a corporation’s environment.Platforms based on metamodelling concepts should support the following topics: 1.Engineering the business models & their web services2.Designing and realizing the corresponding information technology3.Evaluating the used corporation resources and assetsThis paper presents a framework for metamodelling platforms and gives some answers to the research issues stated above. As part of the framework flexible metamodel integration mechanisms, using meta-metamodels (meta2-models) and semantical mapping, are discussed. Additionally, a system architecture and the building blocks of a corporate metamodelling platform are described. Finally, best practices from three EU funded projects—REFINE, ADVISOR, and PROMOTE—all realised with industrial partners, are presented.The full version of the paper can be downloaded from http://www.dke.univie.ac.at/mmp

During the last years the tourism industry realized the potential of Web-based tourism information systems (TIS) to increase the competitiveness by providing individual and specialized information about tourism objects. This leaded to a broad spectrum of tourism information systems distributed over various Web sites. But the described situation is not really satisfying for the users of such systems, the tourists, which required flexible and easy-to-use search functionalities.To fulfill the tourists request for an extensive data collection on the one hand and to provide adequate search functionalities on the other hand, it is inevitable to make accumulated data from different sources accessible. The integration of distributed data sources has great impact on the quality of tourism information systems and follows the trend not to implement further systems, but to extend and improve existing systems. Beside comprehensive integration of tourism data, for tourists simultaneous availability and access to distributed tourism information systems supported by a generic and universally valid client application is desirable.In this paper an adapter concept is introduced which allows uniform and homogenous data interchange between a Web-based client application and several distributed heterogeneous tourism information systems. Moreover, data interchange between different TIS server applications is supported. The key advantage of this concept is that both the client adapter and the server adapter are designed as add-on modules and therefore their installation causes only low adaptation effort concerning existing applications.

We define an object-oriented data model called XSDM (XML Schema Data Model) and present a graphical representation of XML Schema integration. The three layers included are, namely, pre-integration, comparison and integration. During pre-integration, the schema present in XML Schema notation is read and is converted into the XSDM notation. During the comparison phase of integration, correspondences as well as conflicts between elements are identified. During the integration phase, conflict resolution, restructuring and merging of the initial schemas take place to obtain the global schema.

The use of attribute certificates andthe concept of mobile policies have been proposedto overcome some of the limitations of the role basedaccess control (RBAC) paradigm andto implement security requirements such as the “originator controlled” (ORCON) policy. Mobile policies are attachedto the data that they control andenforced by their execution in trusted servers. In this paper we extendthis idea to allow the execution of the policies in untrustedsystems. Our extension allows policies to be boundto the data but not attachedto. Through this modification security administrators are able to change policies dynamically and transparently. Additionally, we introduce X-ACS, an XML-based language designedto express policies in a simple andunam biguous way overcoming the limitations of other approaches. Important features of X-ACS are that it can be used by processors with limited capabilities such as smart cards while allowing the automated validation of policies.

Today, reputation systems such as ebay’s prominent “Feedback Forum” are becoming more widespread. In such a system, reputations are formed by aggregating ratings participants give and receive. These reputations, however, are bound to a specific platform preventing participants from taking and showing their hard-earned reputations elsewhere. That makes the reputations less valuable and leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and total loss. In this paper, we propose a viable solution to these issues in which current P2P and PKI technologies are employed to shift ownership and responsibility back to the participants. Our envisioned Reputation Management System, therefore, uses contextdependent feedback gathered in questionnaires and provides security for peer transactions to ensure integrity, confidentiality and privacy.

There are important details that give legal validity to handwritten signatures: First, the document to be signed is under control of the signatory and it is not possible to substitute or alter it, and second, the tools to produce the signature (the pen and the signatory itself) are also under control of the signatory. These details make possible that handwritten signatures are used in a law court to prove the willingness of the signatory to be bound by the content of the document. Digital signatures require complex calculations that can not be done using mental arithmetic by the signatory. In this case neither document nor tools are under direct control of the signatory but under control of a computer. Consequently, the willingness of the signatory can not be sufficiently demonstrated. Furthermore, to be able to perform digital signatures, we must assume that the user trusts the computer to perform exactly what is intended. This yields digital signatures unusable in scenarios that require mobility. In this paper we present a system to perform digital signatures in environments that require mobility. The system is based on the use of personal digital assistants and smart cards and fulfils the common requirements established in different national laws regarding digital signatures.

The agent programming approach can be beneficial for many new applications on the World Wide Web. We propose a novel agent workspace on the client side for hosting Web agents downloaded from different Web servers—the “Secure Client Agent Environment” (SCAE). This user-centred marketplace facilitates collaboration among Web agents, Web servers and the user. In our agent-based framework, domain-based security servers and authorisation tokens are used to complete the trust links between the client and various Web servers dynamically.

Previous studies on implementing both collaborative and content based filtering systems fail to come to a conclusive solution, and in this light, the decreased accuracy of recommendations is notable. This paper shall first address methods on how to minimize the shortcomings of the two respective systems. Then, by comparing the similarity of the resulting user profiles and group profiles, it is possible to increase the accuracy of the user and group preference. To lessen the negative aspects the following must be done. With the case of the multi dimensional aspects of content based filtering, associated word mining should be used to extract relevant features. The data expressed by the mined features are not expressed as a string of data, but as a related word vector. To make up for its faults, content based filtering systems should use Bayesian classification, a system that classifies products by maintaining a knowledge base of related words. Also, to decrease the sparsity of the user- product matrix, the dimensions must be reduced. In order to reduce the dimensions of the columns, it is necessary to use Bayesian classification in tandem with the related-word knowledge base. Finally to reduce the dimensions of the rows the users must be classified into clusters.

In Electronic Commerce it is not easy for customers to find the best suitable goods as more and more information is placed on line. In order to provide information of high value a customized recommender system is required. One of the typical information retrieval techniques for recommendation systems in Electronic Commerce is collaborative filtering which is based on the ratings of other customers who have similar preferences. However, collaborative filtering may not provide high quality recommendation because it does not consider customer’s preferences on the attributes of an item and the preference is calculated only between a pair of customers. In this paper we present an improved recommendation algorithm for collaborative filtering. The algorithm uses the K-Means Clustering method to reduce the search space. It then utilizes a graph approach to the best cluster with respect to a given test customer in selecting the neighbors with higher similarities as well as lower similarities. The graph approach allows us to exploit the transitivity of similarities. The algorithm also considers the attributes of each item. In the experiment the EachMovie dataset of the Digital Equipment Corporation has been used. The experimental results show that our algorithm provides better recommendation than other methods.

Merchants often use marketing elements such as advertisements, coupons and product recommendations, to attract customers and to convert visitors to buyers. We present a model for making a series of recommendations during a customer session. The model comprises of the customer’s probability of accepting a marketing element from a marketing spot and a reward for the marketing element. The probabilities can be estimated from customer history (such as traversals and purchases), while the reward values could be merchant specified. We propose several recommendation strategies for maximising the merchant’s reward and analyse their effectiveness. Our experiments indicate that strategies that are dynamic and consider multiple marketing spots simultaneously perform well.

Many countries have established eBook standards adequate to their environments. In USA, OEB PS is announced for distribution and display of eBooks, in Japan, JepaX is announced for storage and exchange, and in Korea, EBKS is made for clear exchange of eBook contents. These diverse objectives of standards lead to different content structures, and differences of content structure will cause a problem in exchanging them. To correctly exchange eBook contents, the content structure should be considered. So, in this paper, we study content conversion of standard eBooks based on Korean eBook standard, with contemplating content structures. To convert contents properly, the mapping relations should be clearly defined. For this, we consider standard’s structure and extension mechanisms, and use a path notation and namespaces for precise description. Moreover, through analysis of each mapping relationships, we classify conversion cases into automatic, semi-automatic, and manual conversions. Finally we write up conversion scripts and experiment with them.

Since Internet dominated the world, the World Wide Web platform is used as a type of middleware providing a common platform for Intranetbased and Internet-based application development. Web-based applications have become more complex and demanding, in order to fulfil extended user requirements. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach for the configuration, modification and performance evaluation of web-based systems. Its contribution involves the employment of knowledge-based techniques for the design of web-based systems and the description of problems encountered and the solutions proposed. Emphasis is given on the extendable modelling scheme used to depict web-based application functionality and estimate application requirements from the network infrastructure. Web-based system architectures are designed and evaluated using IDIS environment.

Everyone who already experienced “getting lost” in a web site will agree that navigation support within such sites is a crucial topic in any but the most trivial web-based system. Modeling navigation links as special associations between classes in the UML let us arrive at the conclusion that class diagrams tend to become overloaded with links such that they are no longer understandable and their function as visual aids gets lost. Aiming for more transparent high level navigation modeling within the UML, this paper investigates, in a first step, well-known web design languages for their approaches to the modeling of navigation. By comparing Araneus, OOHDM, and RMM, in a subsequent step, we derive navigation primitives that we suggest to incorporate into the UML as navigational stereotypes. In a final step for two of these stereotypes we propose a concrete implementation in XML. These XML skeletons encode navigation information in a device-independent manner. Thus, UML static structure diagrams, extended by the navigation stereotypes introduced in this paper, have the potential to serve as a full-fledged notation supporting navigation design in web-based systems.

The Semantic Web will bring structure to the content of Web pages, being an extension of the current Web, in which information is given a well-defined meaning. Especially within e-commerce applications, Semantic Web technologies in the form of ontologies and metadata are becoming increasingly prevalent and important. This paper introduce KAON—the Karlsruhe Ontology and Semantic Web Tool Suite. KAON is developed jointly within several EU-funded projects and specifically designed to provide the ontology and metadata infrastructure needed for building, using and accessing semantics-driven applications on the Web and on your desktop.

Web technologies provide several means to infringe user privacy. This is especially true when customers with the intent to buy tangible goods submit their orders containing their real identity and physical address. Then in practice, the vendor can link this information with all information gathered about the customer beforehand, e.g., observation data on him while browsing through the product catalog. In this paper, we present a solution based on mobile agents that can be used to prevent the vendor from directly linking information gathered about the customer while searching with identifying information that is contained in the order. The system allows to introduce an agent delay at the agent base station which can increase the cardinality of the group of candidates to be linked to a product, and thereby to decrease the linking probability.

In order for the Internet-based digital products to be widely accepted, secure copyright distribution mechanism must be provided with advanced traitor tracing mechanism.We present new software copyright protection and electronic license distribution model based on public key scheme. In this model, digital contents can be distributed over a broadcast channel in a encrypted form and the authorized user can decrypt it, which can be traced back with proposed public key tracing mechanism. Proposed model provides efficiency since merchant server can issue electronic licenses in advance by preprocessing. It also provides secure and efficient software live-update mechanism based on traitor tracing scheme.1

In this paper, an intellectual property protection mechanism realized on a watermarking scheme is proposed. The embedding technique we adopted in this paper is based on the modular operation. The modulus is a threshold value which determines how the binary pattern of watermark to be embedded into an image. In order to conduct a better fidelity of the image with the embedded watermark against the perception of human vision system, the random bit-string transformed from the watermark is done first. Then there are two classifications required to perform for the random bit pattern 0/1 during the embedding procedure. Afterwards, we issue several frequent image processing tests, such as JPEG compression, diverse filtering treatments, resampling and requantization, etc., to promote our remarkable result. Comparing to the previous literature in [12] as observed from the experiments, not only the advantages emphasized in [12] are remained, but also the original image is not necessary to check again so as to extract the embedded watermark. Therefore, the scheme explored in this paper is more efficient than the previous scheme, and it is feasible to cope with the protection of intellectual property on the digital image recognition.

Electronic contracting is an essential service to develop electronic commerce. But this service is not very used because merchants and consumers do not trust in contracting by electronic means. For time we already have technical solutions that should allow to give trust to the actors implied in this new scenario. But the lack of international standards and of an appropriate juridical mark, suppose a serious restraint to the contracting by electronic means. Well then, in recent years we can observe some legislative initiatives in the European Union to give full juridical effect to electronic contracting. With these two elements already in course, we believe that a last step will be necessary: to assess the adaptation of the technical solutions regarding the enacted legislation. In this paper, juridical and technical analysis of contract signing protocols is carried out. Besides, we present a modified version of a previous optimistic fair protocol for contract signing.

Business processes play an important role in E-commerce Web applications as they form an important part of the B2C domain and dominate the B2B domain. However, E-commerce application modeling and design techniques have eluded the special characteristics of business processes by treating them just as a special case of navigation. As a consequence, the resulting E-commerce applications have design and usability problems as well as erroneous results from business process execution. We propose a solution to E-commerce Web application design where business processes are considered first class citizens. In this paper we first demonstrate why modeling business processes is important. After a brief introduction, we extend the Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM) with business processes. We show that our approach to E-commerce Web application design involving both hypermedia navigation and business processes is easy and clear and does not cause the listed problems.

It is imperative for a competitive e-business outsourcing service provider to manage the execution of its service level agreement (SLA) contracts in business terms (e.g., minimizing financial penalties for service-level violations, maximizing service-level measurement based customer satisfaction metrics, etc.). In order to do that, the provider must possess a generic means of capturing and managing the SLA contract data (e.g., quality measurement data sources, service-level evaluation rules, etc.) as well as the relationships between them and internal service-level management (SLM) data (e.g., resource management data, system configuration data, etc.). This paper presents the design rationale of a generic SLA semantic model (including a set of semantic elements and relationships) based on an in-depth analysis of nine real ebusiness outsourcing SLA contracts/templates comprising over 100 servicelevel guarantees and intents. Our development experience with a state-of-the-art SLA contract execution manager (named SAM) suggests the semantic model is practical and useful.

The Internet Open Trading Protocol (IOTP) is being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force for electronic commerce (e-commerce) over the Internet. The core of IOTP is a set of trading transactions that reflects the most common trading activities in the real world. We apply the formal method of Coloured Petri Nets (CP-nets) to construct an abstract executable specification of IOTP’s trading transaction protocols. The formal semantics of CP-nets allows us to investigate the termination properties of the transactions using state space techniques. This investigation has revealed deficiencies in the termination of IOTP trading transactions, demonstrating the benefit of applying formal methods to the specification and verification of e-commerce protocols.

A growing number of payment transactions are now being made over the Internet. Although transactions are typically made over a secure channel provided using SSL or TLS, there remain some security risks. Meanwhile, EMV-compliant IC cards are being introduced to reduce fraud for conventional debit/credit transactions. In this paper, we propose a way of using EMV IC cards for secure remote payments, such as those made via the Internet, with the goal of providing protection against some of these residual risks. The scheme described in this paper is based on the EMV 2000 Integrated Circuit Card Specification for Payment Systems, which is first outlined. Threats to, and advantages and disadvantages of, the scheme are also examined.

Companies are not going to invest into the development of innovative applications or services unless these can be charged for appropriately. Thus, the existence of standardized and widely accepted mobile payment procedures is crucial for successful business-to-customer mobile commerce. In this paper we reflect on the acceptance of mobile payment and examine the characteristics of current mobile payment procedures. The outcomes of the paper are a categorization of current mobile payment procedures with strategic, participation and operational criteria and, based on these results, the derivation of the five mobile payment standard types prepaid, mobile money, conventional settlement, premium rate number and dual-card. Finally, a prospect is given to possible further development of mobile payment procedures in the direction of an integrative universal mobile payment system (UMPS).

Research perspectives in the field are still very bright, in spite of the burst of the dot.com bubble approximately a year ago. Systems grounded in solid research and providing a mature technology are starting to dominate a field that was once plagued by immature approaches. This contribution tries to give an overview of what the challenges and opportunities for research will be in this environment.