An Architecture for Information Commerce Systems

The increasing use of the Internet in business and commerce has created a number of new business opportunities and the need for supporting models and platforms. One of these opportunities is information commerce (i-commerce), a special case of ecommerce focused on the purchase and sale of information as a commodity. In this paper we present an architecture for i-commerce systems using OPELIX (Open Personalized Electronic Information Commerce System) [11] as an example. OPELIX provides an open information commerce platform that enables enterprises to produce, sell, deliver, and manage information products and related services over the Internet. We focus on the notion of information marketplace, a virtual location that enables i-commerce, describe the business and domain model for an information marketplace, and discuss the role of intermediaries in this environment. The domain model is used as the basis for the software architecture of the OPELIX system. We discuss the characteristics of the OPELIX architecture and compare our approach to related work in the field

webXice: an Infrastructure for Information Commerce on the WWW

Systems for information commerce on the WWW have to support flexible business models if they should be able to cover a wide range of requirements imposed by the different types of information businesses. This leads to non-trivial functional and security requirements both on the provider and consumer side, for which we introduce an architecture and a system implementation, webXice. We focus on the question, how participants with minimal technological requisites, i.e. solely standard Web browsers available, can be technologically enabled to articipate in the information commerce at a system level, while not sacrificing the functionality and security required by an autonomous participant in an information commerce scenario. In particular, we propose an implementation strategy to efficiently support persistent message logging for light-weight clients, that enables clients to collect and manage non-reputiable messages as proofs. We believe that the capability to support minimal system platforms is a necessary precondition for the wide-spread use of any information commerce infrastructure

Modelling electronic service systems using UML

This paper presents a profile for modelling systems of electronic services using UML. Electronic services encapsulate business services, an organisational unit focused on delivering benefit to a consumer, to enhance communication, coordination and information management. Our profile is based on a formal, workflow-oriented description of electronic services that is abstracted from particular implementation technologies. Resulting models provide the basis for a formal analysis to verify behavioural properties of services. The models can also relate services to management components, including workflow managers and Electronic Service Management Systems (ESMSs), a novel concept drawn from experience of HP Service Composer and DySCo (Dynamic Service Composer), providing the starting point for integration and implementation tasks. Their UML basis and platform-independent nature is consistent with a Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) development strategy, appropriate to the challenge of developing electronic service systems using heterogeneous technology, and incorporating legacy systems

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

The Semantic Grid: A future e-Science infrastructure

e-Science offers a promising vision of how computer and communication technology can support and enhance the scientific process. It does this by enabling scientists to generate, analyse, share and discuss their insights, experiments and results in an effective manner. The underlying computer infrastructure that provides these facilities is commonly referred to as the Grid. At this time, there are a number of grid applications being developed and there is a whole raft of computer technologies that provide fragments of the necessary functionality. However there is currently a major gap between these endeavours and the vision of e-Science in which there is a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation and in which there are flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale. To bridge this practice–aspiration divide, this paper presents a research agenda whose aim is to move from the current state of the art in e-Science infrastructure, to the future infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision. Here the future e-Science research infrastructure is termed the Semantic Grid (Semantic Grid to Grid is meant to connote a similar relationship to the one that exists between the Semantic Web and the Web). In particular, we present a conceptual architecture for the Semantic Grid. This architecture adopts a service-oriented perspective in which distinct stakeholders in the scientific process, represented as software agents, provide services to one another, under various service level agreements, in various forms of marketplace. We then focus predominantly on the issues concerned with the way that knowledge is acquired and used in such environments since we believe this is the key differentiator between current grid endeavours and those envisioned for the Semantic Grid

Towards Developing Grid-based Portals for E-Commerce on-Demand Services on a Utility Computing Platform

Trends and current practices in the design and development of grid-enabled portals(GeP) reveal the need to identify and fulfill certain additional relevant requirements in order to build applicable and usable grid-enabled portals for evolving computing platforms such as the utility computing (UC). This paper reports an investigation of the minimum relevant additional requirements that must be fulfilled to attain effective GeP design for UC. A GeP prototype for the Grid-based Utility Infrastructure for Small, Micro, and Medium Enterprises (SMME) Enabling Technology (GUISET) initiative – a UC platform was developed, and an analytic evaluation experiment undertaken in the study to elicit these additional requirements using a set of benchmark requirements (standards) revealed that it fulfilled the minimum requirements to be suitable for UC context. The result of the study underlines the need for more controlled experiments in portal prototyping in order to foster the practice of GeP design for UC

Communication and Procedural Models of the E-commerce Systems

E-commerce systems became a standard interface between sellers (or suppliers) and customers. One of basic condition of an e-commerce system to be efficient is correct definitions and describes of the all internal and external processes. All is targeted the customers´ needs and requirements. The optimal and most exact way how to obtain and find optimal solution of e-commerce system and its processes structure in companies is the modeling and simulation. In this article author shows basic model of communication between customers and sellers in connection with the customer feedback and procedural models of e-commerce systems in terms of e-shops. Procedural model was made with the aid of definition of SOA.E-commerce, decision-making processes, customer requirements, customer feedback, e-commerce processes, CRM, models.