Supporting Electronic Commerce Transactions With Contracting Services

Abstract

Based on the specific characteristics and requirements for an adequate electronic commerce system support, this article gives an overview of the respective distributed systems technologies which are available for open and heterogeneous electronic commerce applications. Abstracting from basic communication mechanisms such as (transactionally secure) remote procedure calls and remote database access mechanisms, this includes service trading and brokerage functions as well as security aspects including such as notary and non-repudiation functions. Further important elements of a system infrastructure for electronic commerce applications are: Common middleware infrastructures, componentware techniques, distributed and mobile agent technologies etc. As electronic transactions enter the phase of performance, increasingly new and important functions are required. Among these are: Negotiation protocols to support both the settlement and fulfillment of electronic contracts as well as ad-hoc workflow management support for compound and distributed services in electronic commerce applications. In addition to an overview of the state of the art of the respective technology, the article briefly presents some related projects conducted by the authors jointly with international partners in order to realize some of the important new functions of a system infrastructure for open distributed electronic commerce applications.

An e-contracting reference architecture

“…The architecture qualities are qualities that are important for the design of a ''good" e-contracting reference architecture. Initially, as an inspiration for the definition of non-functional qualities required in an e-contracting reference architecture, we used the list of non-functional qualities on information systems presented in Bass et al (2003) and existing publications on e-contracting (Angelov and Grefen, 2002, 2003b, 2004aGrefen et al, 2003;Griffel et al, 1998;Hoffner et al, 2001b;Merz et al, 1998). Based on our initial list of requirements, we defined a draft version of ERA.…”

“…For example, (Ludwig et al, 2004) concentrates on contracting of Web Services and (Jennings et al, 2000) discusses contracting between software agents for support of workflows. A discussion on the system functionalities required for e-contracting in general settings is presented in the scope of the COSMOS project Merz et al, 1998). However, the publications that resulted from this project did not address the design of an e-contracting architecture.…”

Building an e-marketplace on a peer-to-peer infrastructure

“…Given that all the required technology is readily available (XML, S/MIME, HTTPS, TLS, digital signatures), the challenge is to define a contractual framework that assists in developing legally supported business relationships that are accompanied by a TPA, where a TPA is the common and neutral representation for all obligations the involved parties agreed on (Merz et al 1998). Several research projects have addressed this challenge, for example ECLIP (Cavanillas and Nadal 1999), eLEGAL (Hassan et al 2001), Octane24 (ComNetMedia 2001, and CrossFlow (Hoffner 1999).…”

A Coverage-Determination Mechanism for Checking Business Contracts against Organizational Policies

“…Current contract-driven inter-enterprise workflow architectures, such as COS-MOS [12] and CrossFlow [11] focus on service advertisement and invocation, but do not ascertain consistency between contractual terms and business policies. Initiatives such as the OASIS ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile (CPP) and Agreement (CPA) specifications [7] again provide service advertisement and conformance-checking framework specification for the negotiation of organizational inter-operation.…”