An Atomicity-Generating Layer for Anonymous Currencies

Atomicity is a necessary element for reliable transactions (Financial Service Technology Consortium, 1995; Camp, Sirbu and Tygar, 1995; Tygar, 1996). Anonymity is also an issue of great importance not only to designers of commerce systems, (Chaum, 1982; Chaum, 1989; Chaum, Fiat & Naor, 1988; Medvinski, 1993), but also to those concerned with the societal effects of information technologies (Branscomb 1994. Compaine 1985, National Research Council 1996, Neumann 1993, Poole 1983). Yet there has been a tradeoff between these two elements in commerce system design. Reliable systems, which provide highly atomic transactions, offer limited anonymity (Visa, 1995; Sirbu and Tygar, 1995; Mastercard, 1995, Low, Maxemchuk and Paul, 1993) . Anonymous systems (Chaum, 1985; Chaum 1989; Medvinski, 1993) do not offer reliable transactions as shown in Yee, 1994; Camp, 1999; and Tygar, 1996. This work illustrates that any electronic token currency can be made reliable with the addition of this atomicity-generating layer.IB

Challenges to describe QoS requirements for web services quality prediction to support web services interoperability in electronic commerce

Quality of service (QoS) is significant and necessary for web service applications quality assurance. Furthermore, web services quality has contributed to the successful implementation of Electronic Commerce (EC) applications. However, QoS is still the big issue for web services research and remains one of the main research questions that need to be explored. We believe that QoS should not only be measured but should also be predicted during the development and implementation stages. However, there are challenges and constraints to determine and choose QoS requirements for high quality web services. Therefore, this paper highlights the challenges for the QoS requirements prediction as they are not easy to identify. Moreover, there are many different perspectives and purposes of web services, and various prediction techniques to describe QoS requirements. Additionally, the paper introduces a metamodel as a concept of what makes a good web service

Automating distributed workflow for electronic commerce: A model for building meta-workflow components

Business software development environments for web- based applications are at a very early stage in their potential lifecycle. The purpose of this research agenda is to develop a model for how business processes can be interpreted into primitive computer codes for web applications. We have taken a transaction perspective adapted from the distributed database approach to maintenance of integrity assuming the concepts of ACIDity (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) and serializability. This perspective is consistent with emerging literature on “workflow agents” [e.g., Huhns and Singh, 1998]. In this paper, we design, develop, and show an example of a meta-level set of building blocks for a direct mapping between electronic commerce and workflow processes. To validate the sufficiency and completeness of the meta-level components proposed, a complete mapping of an electronic commerce application to meta-workflow components is proposed

Atomicity Implementation in E-Commerce Systems

Distributed databases with high performance and availability do not have the traditional ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) because long duration locks will reduce the availability and the write performance. The problems of the missing ACID properties may be avoided by using approximated ACID properties, i.e. from an application point of view; the system should function as if all the traditional ACID properties had been implemented. The distributed approximated atomicity property manages the workflow of a transaction in such a way that either all the updates of the global transaction are executed (sooner or later) or all the updates of the global transaction are removed/compensated. In this paper, we will describe a flexible algorithm for implementing distributed approximated atomicity. Frank and Zahle [1] have described how to implement the other global approximated ACID properties. We will illustrate our algorithm with E-commerce examples. If one of the partaking subsystems fails in a system for E-commerce, the approximated atomicity property will ensure that when an order is accepted, the payment and stock levels are managed automatically in the locations of the partaking banks and product stocks. Even logistics and/or production may be managed by using approximated atomicity. We have cooperated with one of the major ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software companies in designing a distributed version of the ERP system with local autonomous databases in the different sales and stock locations

An Agile Protocol for E-Commerce

With merchant information increasing rapidly, customers have to spend a lot of time and energies to search for goods they need, as a result, they maybe find nothing. If merchant can respond customer’s requirements agilely when the event defined by customer appears, blindness of customer can be avoided, merchant wins business opportunities too. Protocol is the technology fundament for e-commerce. An idea for agile mechanism is introduced, this paper designs an e-commerce protocol with agility, and it discusses its security. This protocol improves e-commerce efficiency and solves activity problems

Dematerialized Monies – New Means of Payment

In this paper, we will outline the financial context in which the main means of payment dematerialization occurs. We will present the main characteristics of these new types of dematerialized monies: electronic money, virtual money, digital money, private money, purses and holders.means of payment, dematerialized monies: electronic, virtual, digital, private, purses and holders.