Guest Editor's Introduction
Electronic commerce offers many exciting research problems to the
database community and this special section is intended to be a step
in identiftying some of the opportunities.
Electronic commerce is a generic term that encompasses numerous
information technologies and services used in improving business
practices ranging from customer service to intraand inter-corporation
coordination. One of the most common instances of electronic commerce
is the exchange of goods and services over the Internet, extranet or
intranet, but there is a number of other instances: e-shop,
e-procurement, e-mall, market places, banking, virtual communities and
enterprises, value chain service providers, collaboration platforms
and information brokerage.
Electronic commerce is characterized by a wide range of services and
operations, including: establishment of initial contacts, suppliers
search and negotiation, exchange of information, sales, pre- and
post-sales support, electronic payment, distribution logistics,
electronic contracts and digital signatures, establishment and
coordination of virtual enterprises, shared business processes,
etc. In all of its forms, electronic commerce makes use of information
technologies from different areas such as databases, transaction
processing, interoperability of heterogeneous information resources,
intelligent agents, multimedia systems, distributed systems, WWW,
security and workflow systems.
This special section contains papers describing experiences,
prototypes, technologies and frameworks both in academia and in
industry reflecting the current state of practice in electronic
commerce as well as indicating the future research directions.
The paper by Bichler, Segev and Zhao, describes the current practices
in componentbased electronic commerce and analyzes the future research
and development directions in this respect. The paper also identifies
several research areas with database focus.
Sherif Danish notes that the supply chain integration is happening at
a very fast pace and therefore dynamic database-driven electronic
catalogs are essential. He then addresses the related issues and
proposes solutions.
Meltzer and Glushko stress the importance of XML in electronic
commerce and briefly describe the Veo Systems Inc.'s effort to create
a Common Business Library (CBL) of XML components for use in
electronic commerce applications. Standard commerce transaction
documents are expressed in XML and CBL architecture makes it possible
to compose documents from smaller document "building blocks". CBL is
available for public use free of charge.
Dogac et. al. propose a workflow based electronic marketplace
exploiting the currently emerging data exchange and metadata
representation standards on the Web. In this market architecture,
electronic commerce is realized through the adaptable workflow
templates provided by the marketplace to its users.
Jennings et. al. describe a multiagent architecture for business
process management where responsability for enacting various
components of the business process is delegated to a number of
autonomous problem solving agents. Since agents are autonomous there
are no control dependencies among them; therefore in order to reach a
mutual agreement they negotiate through a multi-lateral and
multi-issue decision mechanism that has been developed to assist an
agent in evaluating offers and, when necessary, generating new offers.
The paper also describes an application of the developed technology to
a system for managing a British Telecom (BT) process for providing a
quotation for designing a network to provide particular services to a
customer.
The paper by Reich and Ben-Shaul presents an auction based generic
market architecture which allows decomposability into components that
can be independently tailored or replaced to form specific, unforseen
market policies. The system also allows dynamic reconfiguration of the
market.
The paper by Boll, Klas and Bataglin describes the architecture of a
trading system for a DBMS-based electronic marketplace for
business-to-business electronic commerce according to a n-
suppliers:m-customers scenario realized within the scope of the RMP
(Rural Market Place) project.
The paper by Buchner and Mulvenna proposes an environment that
combines existing online analytical mining as well as Web usage mining
which can be exploited for electronic commerce activities, such as
personalization, adaptation, customization, profiling and
recommendation.
The paper by Domingo-Ferrer and Herrera-Joancomarti proposes a trade
agent system where agents are not to be trusted. The proposed scheme
also supports off-line anonymous payments.
The paper by Christoffel et. al. describes a marketplace for document
services consisting mainly of user agents, traders which register
metadata concerning existing services and wrappers that hide the
syntactical and semantic heterogeneity of individual services.
I wish to thank to the authors for contributing quality articles as
well as to the external reviewers of this issue, namely, Hakki
Toroslu, Elena Ferrari, Vijay Atluri and Sena (Nural) Arpinar. Finally
I would like to thank Michael Franklin for providing me the
opportunity.
Asuman Dogac
Software Research and Development Center
Dept. of Computer Engineering
Middle East Technical University
06531, Ankara, Turkey
