vCOM: Electronic commerce in a collaborative virtual world

Existing e-commerce applications on the web provide the users a relatively simple, browser-based interface to access available products. Customers are not provided with the same shopping experience as they would in an actual store or mall. This experience, however, can be achieved by the creation of a virtual shopping mall environment, simulating most of the actual shopping user interactions. The virtual mall brings together the services and products of various vendors. Users can navigate through the virtual shopping malls, adding items of interest into a virtual shopping cart, and perform searches assisted by ‘intelligent agents’. A Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) can realize a sophisticated virtual shopping application. In such a CVE, a large number of potential users may interact with each other. In this paper, vCOM, a VRML and Java3D-based prototype is presented, which permits users to navigate around virtual e-commerce worlds and perform collaborative shopping and intelligent searches with the assistance of software agents, in order to find the products and services of interest to them. They can then negotiate with sales agents to bargain for the best possible price and then make a secure buying transaction. The virtual mall prototype also allows the user to communicate with an ‘intelligent shopping assistant’ using simple voice commands. This assistant interacts with the shopper using voice synthesis and helps him/her use the interface to efficiently navigate in the mall. Real-time interactions between the entities in this shared environment are implemented over the High Level Architecture (HLA), an IEEE standard for distributed simulations and modeling. The paper focuses on user interface design, collaborative e-commerce through HLA and multi-agent architecture.     

Emerging standards for component software

Component software benefits include reusability and interoperability, among others. What are the similarities and differences between the competing standards for this new technology, and how will they interoperate? Object-oriented technology is steadily gaining acceptance for commercial and custom application development through programming languages such as C++ and Smalltalk, object oriented CASE tools, databases, and operating systems such as Next Computer's NextStep. Two emerging technologies, called compound documents and component software, will likely accelerate the spread of objectoriented concepts across system-level services, development tools, and application-level behaviours. Tied closely to the popular client/server architecture for distributed computing, compound documents and component software define object-based models that facilitate interactions between independent programs. These new approaches promise to simplify the design and implementation of complex software applications and, equally important, simplify human-computer interactive work models for application end users. Following unfortunate tradition, major software vendors have developed competing standards to support and drive compound document and component software technologies. These incompatible standards specify distinct object models, data storage models, and application interaction protocols. The incompatibilities have generated confusion in the market, as independent software vendors, system integrators, in-house developers, and end users struggle to sort out the standards' relative merits, weaknesses, and chances for commercial success. Let's take a look now at the general technical concepts underlying compound documents and component software. Then we examine the OpenDoc, OLE 2, COM, and CORBA standards being proposed for these two technologies. Finally, we'll review the work being done to extend the standards and to achieve interoperability across them     

XPECT: a framework for electronic commerce

Electronic commerce is emerging as one of the most important applications on the Internet, with the potential to revolutionize the whole structure of retail merchandising and shopping. There is already a need for an information technology infrastructure that goes well beyond the simple capabilities offered by the current development environments for Internet applications. For electronic commerce to really take off, however, it will have to give shoppers options not available through traditional commercial channels. This implies the further need for an infrastructure that can support complex and flexible services to manage customer tailored requests in the context of highly dynamic networks and federations of providers. To achieve this level of support will mean using the functionalities now considered to be whole applications as the elementary building blocks of e-commerce applications. Among these functionalities are: transactional payment; workflow; and multiparty agreement. To address these issues, we developed XPect, a generic framework for electronic commerce. The XPect framework supports the integration of multiple component functionalities. It is implemented in the Coordination Language Facility, an object based distributed application development tool. CLF assumes an object model of autonomous agents that can engage in interactions, more sophisticated than those in the traditional object paradigm. In addition, CLF allows for dynamically adding new services and for coordinating the access to multiple services     

Life cycle management

Life Cycle Management of electronic computer/communications systems is maturing after thirty years of experimentation and some false starts. This holistic concept provides an improved framework for planning, implementation and control of electronic hardware or software systems. It effects of symbiosis between users and suppliers who are both concerned with reliability of hardware and software, cost-effectiveness of applications, and the impacts of a rapidly changing technology. Improved cooperation between hardware/software vendors and users will undoubtedly result in significantly better product designs and services as well as their more intelligent use by sophisticated and concerned management.     

Bridging e-business and added trust: keys to e-business growth

Systems based on a proper public-key infrastructure (PKI) architecture offer the missing trust and interoperability necessary for e-commerce expansion. As the number of services available to users continues to increase, so will the need to maintain the user's identity in a secured, trusted manner. The user name and password concept has worked thus far but lacks the portability and scalability that global e-commerce demands. An interoperable PKI system that offers trust services between users will become a common industry practice. We envision that the future global e-commerce system should work with various devices, from desktops to handheld computers. Eventually one certificate will represent an individual across multiple services and devices     

The object-powered Web

The convergence of Web and object oriented technologies will allow applications to transcend conventional boundaries of platform, organizational function, enterprise, industry, and geography to leverage the power of distributed computing. For developers, this will mean the ability to use new or legacy code-possibly running on transcontinentally located machines-to build distributed, three tier client server applications. For end users, this will mean the ability to integrate information needs across and beyond the enterprise. For the computing world, this will mean applications that transcend conventional boundaries of platform, organizational function, enterprise, industry, and geography, leveraging the true power of distributed computing     

国产卫星遥感综合应用服务平台及原型实现

针对国产卫星遥感数据利用现状,为促进国产卫星遥感数据利用率以及行业应用深度、广度等问题,探讨了国产卫星遥感综合应用服务平台框架与关键技术,同时以天津为示范区,选取规划局、国土局与海河委三个行业部门为典型应用对象,搭建了国产卫星遥感综合应用服务平台示范性原型系统。该原型系统改变传统遥感应用服务模式,与电子商务结合利用网络为行业用户提供数据服务,产品服务,在线分析服务以及用户所需服务的一站式服务模式。实践证明相关技术路线的可行性与实用性。     

Adaptive personal agents

Personal agents are an important advance in the management of electronic information. Accurate user profiling is critical to the personalisation of agent-based services. In this paper we describe a framework for personal agents, which provides a range of services using a common user profile. The user profile is automatically learned from observation of the electronic documents a user reads, and tracks user interests over time. We report on a large trial of this framework, which has given us important insights into the effectiveness of personal agent applications. In particular we discuss the benefits obtained from the use of a common profile and the interoperation of several personal agent applications.     

A modelling approach to Service oriented Architecture for on-line diagnosis

Failure diagnosis is one of the key challenges of Service oriented Architectures. One of the methods of identifying occurrences of failure is to use Diagnosers; software modules or services are deployed with the system to monitor the interaction between services for identifying whether a failure has happened or may have happened. This paper aims to present a suitable modelling framework to allow automated creation of Diagnosers based on Discrete Event System (DES) theory. Coming up with an appropriate modelling language framework is a prerequisite to applying DES techniques. Modelling languages popular in DES, such as Petri nets and automata, despite being sufficiently adequate for modelling, are not well adopted by the SoA community. Inspired by Petri nets and Workflow Graph, the modelling suggested in this paper closely follows BPEL that is widely used by the community. In particular, our language includes constructs that are supported by major tool vendors. To demonstrate that the suggested formal language is a suitable basis for the application of DES theory, we have extended one of the existing DES methods for the creation of centralised Diagnoser. Two algorithms for creating Diagnosers are put forward. These algorithms are applied into the models that are abstracted from the BPEL representation of the involving services. As a proof of concept, an implementation of the suggested approach is created as an Oracle JDeveloper plugin that automatically produces new Diagnosing services and integrates them to work with existing services. The paper ends with a series of empirical results on the performance-related aspects of the proposed method.     

P3P Adoption on E-Commerce Web sites: A Survey and Analysis

Privacy is an increasingly important issue for Internet users, especially in the world of e-commerce, where they must disclose large amounts of personal information to make purchases. Various privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are currently available, including the platform for privacy preferences project, privacy seals, and human-readable privacy policies. In particular, P3P has been the subject of considerable interest; however, it's also highly dependent on the symbiotic deployment of P3P user agents and policies on vendors' Web sites. Internet users and vendors must commit time and resources to deploy P3P agents or policies, and thus require evidence that the technology won't stagnate or become obsolete. In this article, we survey the current rate of P3P deployment within the e-commerce industry. We also examine P3P's usefulness as a PET, using Everett Rogers' drivers of innovation adoption     

��DDS: A Middleware for Real-time Wireless Embedded Systems

A Real-Time Wireless Distributed Embedded System (RTWDES) is formed by a large quantity of small devices with certain computing power, wireless communication and sensing/actuators capabilities. These types of networks have become popular as they have been developed for applications which can carry out a vast quantity of tasks, including home and building monitoring, object tracking, precision agriculture, military applications, disaster recovery, industry applications, among others. For this type of applications a middleware is used in software systems to bridge the gap between the application and the underlying operating system and networks. As a result, a middleware system can facilitate the development of applications and is designed to provide common services to the applications. The development of a middleware for sensor networks presents several challenges due to the limited computational resources and energy of the different nodes. This work is related with the design, implementation and test of a micro middleware for RTWDES; the proposal incorporates characteristics of a message oriented middleware thus allowing the applications to communicate by employing the publish/subscribe model. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed middleware provides a stable and timely service to support different Quality of Service (QoS) levels.     

Integrating and customizing heterogeneous e-commerce applications

A broad spectrum of electronic commerce applications is currently available on the Web, providing services in almost any area one can think of. As the number and variety of such applications grow, more business opportunities emerge for providing new services based on the integration and customization of existing applications. (Web shopping malls and support for comparative shopping are just a couple of examples.) Unfortunately, the diversity of applications in each specific domain and the disparity of interfaces, application flows, actor roles in the business transaction, and data formats, renders the integration and manipulation of applications a rather difficult task. In this paper we present the Application Manifold system, aimed at simplifying the intricate task of integration and customization of e-commerce applications. The scope of the work in this paper is limited to web-enabled e-commerce applications. We do not support the integration/customization of proprietary/legacy applications. The wrapping of such applications as web services is complementary to our work. Based on the emerging Web data standard, XML, and application modeling standard, UML, the system offers a novel declarative specification language for describing the integration/customization task, supporting a modular approach where new applications can be added and integrated at will with minimal effort. Then, acting as an application generator, the system generates a full integrated/customized e-commerce application, with the declarativity of the specification allowing for the optimization and verification of the generated application. The integration here deals with the full profile of the given e-commerce applications: the various services offered by the applications, the activities and roles of the different actors participating in the application (e.g., customers, vendors), the application flow, as well as with the data involved in the process. This is in contrast to previous works on Web data integration that focused primarily on querying the data available in the applications, mostly ignoring the additional aspects mentioned above. Received: 30 October 2000 / Accepted 14 March 2001 Published online: 2 August 2001     

An aspect‐oriented software architecture for code mobility

Mobile agents have come forward as a technique for tackling the complexity of open distributed applications. However, the pervasive nature of code mobility implies that it cannot be modularized using only object‐oriented (OO) concepts. In fact, developers frequently evidence the presence of mobility scattering in their system's modules. Despite these problems, they usually rely on OO application programming interfaces (APIs) offered by the mobility platforms. Such classical API‐oriented designs suffer a number of architectural restrictions, and there is a pressing need for empowering developers with an architectural framework supporting a flexible incorporation of code mobility in the agent applications. This work presents an aspect‐oriented software architecture, called ArchM, ensuring that code mobility has an enhanced modularization and variability in agent systems, and is straightforwardly introduced in otherwise stationary agents. It addresses OO APIs' restrictions and is independent of specific platforms and applications. An ArchM implementation also overcomes fine‐grained problems related to mobility tangling and scattering at the implementation level. The usefulness and usability of ArchM are assessed within the context of two case studies and through its composition with two mobility platforms. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What a smartphone is to me: understanding user values in using smartphones

The objective of this study is twofold. First, it aims to investigate the various values users achieve with smartphones, which is a form of user‐empowering information technology (IT). The other objective is to introduce a means‐end chain approach into IT‐user studies. An important attraction of smartphones is their personalized environment, which is mainly provided by varied applications. The user personalization ability implies that users achieve diverse benefits with smartphones; that is, users decide what a smartphone is to them rather than adopt a given product. Thus, investigating what values users pursue with a smartphone (i.e. a value‐oriented approach) will give insights into understanding the users. To investigate user values in using smartphones, we conducted a laddering interview with 54 smartphone users and analyzed the data by using a means‐end chain approach to understand consumers' hierarchical value structure. This study contributes to value‐oriented research on user‐empowering IT by revelling how users benefit from smartphones. Furthermore, the study advances value‐oriented research by showing what users actually do with smartphones, from concrete activities to abstract values. In addition, a means‐end chain approach introduced in the study can be another angle for the investigation of user adoption of technology, in that it can describe IT use contexts and practices, which become an important object of analysis in the information systems research.     

A middleware for industry

This paper describes an innovative distributed framework for monitoring and control of large-scale systems by integrating heterogeneous smart objects, the world of physical devices, sensors and actuators, legacy devices and sub-systems, cooperating to support holistic management [1]. Its featured Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) exposes objects’ capabilities by means of web services, thus supporting syntactic and semantic interoperability among different technologies, including SCADA systems [23]. Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN) devices and legacy subsystems cooperate while orchestrated by a manager in charge of enforcing a distributed logic. Particularly crafted for industrial networks are new middleware services such as dynamic spectrum management, distributed control logic, object virtualization, WSANs gateways, a SCADA gateway service, and data fusion transport capability. In addition, new application oriented objects such as shop floor, manufacturing line, welding station, robots, and cells have been introduced in the middleware. The combination of such objects and previous modules offers a new and flexible industry oriented middleware. A second contribution is in the form of traffic analysis conducted at the floor level. It shows the dominance of some end systems such as PLCs, the presence well behaved almost constant traffic made up of small packets.     

The Changing Software Business: Moving from Products to Services

The dramatic changes in the software business over the past few years have important implications for both users and producers of software products and services. Traditional product sales and license fees have declined, and product company revenues have shifted to services such as annual maintenance payments that entitle users to patches, minor upgrades, and often technical support. A dramatic shift is under way in the enterprise-software industry as established vendors embrace services in the wake of declining product revenues. It remains to be seen whether life-cycle dynamics or business-model choices are behind the long-term trend.     

Multicast support in mobile commerce applications

Mobile commerce is an emerging discipline that involves mobile devices, applications, middleware, and wireless networks. Although most e-commerce applications can be modified to run in a wireless environment, m-commerce includes a wide range of new services ranging from locational advertising to mobile offices that are only possible with a wireless infrastructure. Among the many challenges m-commerce presents to network designers, service providers, vendors, and applications developers is providing support for multicast communications. Unlike broadcasting, in which everyone is sent a message, or replicated unicasting, in which messages are sent one by one to individual clients, multicasting involves sending messages to only a select group of mobile users. It thus avoids sending messages to too many users or using too many resources to send messages. The article presents five classes of m-commerce applications that require or can benefit from multicast support in wireless networks. Even among those requiring such support, specific requirements vary considerably. Reliability is an important requirement for many m-commerce applications, while real-time applications need low latency or a certain quality of service. Security is also a major concern in some instances     

Will 3G really be the next big wireless technology

It appears that wireless technology has reached a turning point, as vendors and researchers prepare to take it to the next level. Most industry observers agree that next-level wireless technology will offer more bandwidth, security, and reliability, making it more suitable for multimedia, e-commerce, videoconferencing, and other advanced applications. A key issue for wireless is what form the technology's next generation will take. Many vendors, and other industry observers contend the next level will be the much-discussed third-generation wireless approach, which is actually a set of digital, packet-based, broadband technologies. Vendors are just starting to implement 3G, but some experts in the field are already questioning its functionality and usefulness     

Association of users with software agents in e-commerce

This paper aims at answering three questions related to the association of users with software agents. This association applies to the e-commerce field in which users have online access to several products and services. Such users could delegate their routine and tedious transactions to agents that will be acting on their behalf. Why, how, and when this delegation occurs is discussed in this paper. Agents are considered in e-commerce due to the features that embody them, such as autonomy and mobility.