Electronic Commerce Systems Research Articles

A Formal Representation of Collaborative Electronic Commerce Systems by Workflow Nets

Combining the advantages of logical workflow nets and colored Petri nets, logical and colored workflow nets and collaborative logical and colored workflow nets are presented to facilitate the modeling of cooperative electronic commerce systems. The formal representation presented in this paper can not only describe the data objects, but also represent passing value indeterminacy and batch processing function of cooperative electronic commerce systems.

Research on B2C Electronic Commerce System Based on X3D/VRML

Firstly, the thesis analyzes the basic concepts and features of X3D virtual reality modeling language (VRML), X3D is 3D graphic criterion that is follow on, extensible. Secondly, the thesis presents the application frame of VRML in B2C Electronic Commerce systems. By using the technology of VRML, such as the 3D modeling technology, interactive technology and database access technology combined with ASP, the E-commerce system can connect business and customer. The B2C E-commerce platform based on X3D/VRML technology has the trait of instant, 3d, interactive and verisimilitude, provide enhanced receptivity and interactivity for E-commerce. With the organic integration of E-commerce system and VRML technology, the competitiveness of E-commerce will be improved. Virtual 3D B2C E-commerce system will be the platform for enterprise informatization.

The Application of Bayesian Classification Theories in Distance Education System

With the vigorous application of distance education in recent years, the biggest challenge that the learners and managers are facing today is how to institute the training courses and choose the learning resources according to the personal characteristics of learners. It is subjective to arbitrarily decide the learning resources. This study presents a new constructional method, based on the Bayesian networks of courses relationship. This method uses the feedback of learning resources from the learners and examination results of training courses as data samples. And a new procedure is presented, joining quantitative value of RFM model and naive Bayesian algorithm, to classify the learners and offer more support to make decision. Moreover, the experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm is efficient and accurate, and the Bayesian network method can be used in other Electronic Commerce System Index Terms—Bayesian networks; naive Bayesian; classification; distance education; RFM model

A 2D Barcode Validation System for Mobile Commerce

The wide deployment of wireless networks and mobile technologies and the significant increase in the number of mobile device users has created a very strong demand for emerging mobile commerce applications and services. Barcode-based identification and validation solutions are considered an important part of electronic commerce systems, particularly in electronic supply chain systems. This paper reports a mobile-based 2D barcode validation system as part of mobile commerce systems. This barcode-based validation solution is developed based on the Data Matrix 2D-Barcode standard to support barcode-based validation in mobile commerce systems on mobile devices. The paper demonstrates its application by building a mobile movie ticketing system.

A Multi-agent Based Electronic Commerce System Based on Classified Learning Mechanism

A Multi-agent Based Electronic Commerce System Based on Classified Learning Mechanism

Formal Notions of Trust and Confidentiality- Enabling Reasoning about System Security

Historically, various different notions of trust can be found, each addressing particular aspects of ICT systems, e.g., trust in electronic commerce systems based on reputation and recommendation, or trust in public key infrastructures. While these notions support the understanding of trust establishment and degrees of trustworthiness in their respective application domains, they are insufficient when addressing the more general notion of trust needed when reasoning about security in ICT systems. Furthermore, their purpose is not to elaborate on the security mechanisms used to substantiate trust assumptions and thus they do not support reasoning about security in ICT systems. In this paper, a formal notion of trust is presented that expresses trust requirements from the view of different entities involved in the system and that enables to relate, in a step-by-step process, high level security requirements to those trust assumptions that cannot be further substantiated by security mechanisms, thus supporting formal reasoning about system security properties. Integrated in the Security Modeling Framework SeMF this formal definition of trust can support security engineering processes and formal validation and verification by enabling reasoning about security properties with respect to trust.

AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF FACTORS AFFECTING ADOPTION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF B2B E-COMMERCE IN AUSTRALIAN HEALTH CARE ORGANIZATIONS

For the health care industry, the adoption and implementation of business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce (e-commerce) systems can lead to many benefits, such as an increased accessibility to providers, reduction in supply chain and inventory costs, and reduced medical errors. However, despite high expectations for realizing the benefits of B2B e-commerce in health care, its adoption remains poorly understood and is a relatively under-researched area. Although B2B e-commerce provides these organizations a wealth of new opportunities and ways of doing business, it also presents a series of challenges. Hence, the case study approach was utilized (1) to identify B2B e-commerce adoption and implementation critical constraint-minimization factors for organizations within the health care industry; and (2) to develop a framework to manage these critical constraint-minimization factors. A key contribution of the paper is to propose a framework in which critical constraint-minimization factors faced by health care organizations undertaking B2B e-commerce activities can be identified, examined, and managed.

Editorial: special issue on ubiquitous electronic commerce systems

Ubiquitous computing is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. Emerging ubiquitous electronic commerce systems (UECS) are expected to be available anytime, anywhere, and using different official or personal computing devices. Systems and services such as digital libraries, on-line business transactions, mobile office and mobile TV are widely deployed. Users will be able to access these services anytime, anywhere, while using any computing device in a pervasive way. For example, a user may bring a PDA on a field trip, carry a laptop (with both wireless and wired network cards) on a business trip, use high performance workstations at work, and use desktop PCs at home (with dial-up, cable, or DSL connection). In another example, a user continues to watch the soccer game over home TV, while he watches the game through a mobile device out of home. Some other

The moderating effects of gender on e-commerce systems adoption factors: An empirical investigation

For e-commerce designers and human–computer interaction researchers, electronic commerce (e-commerce) systems adoption factors and the moderating effects of gender are important topics. Even though there are research endeavors to explain e-commerce systems adoption, one of the main questions to be answered is regarding the normative and affective factors based on the theory of reasoned action and self-determination theory. In this paper, social norms, perceived enjoyment, and their relationships to intention to adopt an e-commerce system are tested ( n = 322). Furthermore, the moderating effects of gender are tested based on the sociolinguistic literature. As expected, the influence of social norms is stronger in the female group while the influence of enjoyment is stronger in the male group. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the paper.

A Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithm Based on User Clustering and Item Clustering

Personalized recommendation systems can help people to find interesting things and they are widely used with the development of electronic commerce. Many recommendation systems employ the collaborative filtering technology, which has been proved to be one of the most successful techniques in recommender systems in recent years. With the gradual increase of customers and products in electronic commerce systems, the time consuming nearest neighbor collaborative filtering search of the target customer in the total customer space resulted in the failure of ensuring the real time requirement of recommender system. At the same time, it suffers from its poor quality when the number of the records in the user database increases. Sparsity of source data set is the major reason causing the poor quality. To solve the problems of scalability and sparsity in the collaborative filtering, this paper proposed a personalized recommendation approach joins the user clustering technology and item clustering technology. Users are clustered based on users’ ratings on items, and each users cluster has a cluster center. Based on the similarity between target user and cluster centers, the nearest neighbors of target user can be found and smooth the prediction where necessary. Then, the proposed approach utilizes the item clustering collaborative filtering to produce the recommendations. The recommendation joining user clustering and item clustering collaborative filtering is more scalable and more accurate than the traditional one.

Security, ethics and electronic commerce systems: cybercrime and the need for information sharing security

Electronic Commerce (EC) provides the gateway for an enterprise's employees, managers, customers (clients), and all trusted suppliers and Trading Partners (TPs) to access electronic data applications and all the information they need (Akoh, 2001). Information security can be defined as the means of protecting data and information systems from any unauthorised access, use, disclosure, modification or destruction with the eventual goals of protecting the confidentiality, reliability and availability of information. When it is done correctly, tangible business benefits can be realised, including increased performance and efficiency, greater transparency and visibility of business processes, awareness of critical assets, risk reduction, and ultimately a direct improvement in the bottom line. Cyber attacks appear to be increasing in frequency, and few are willing to ignore the possibility that the severity of future attacks could be much greater than what has been observed to date. This paper discusses the relationship between security, ethics and information sharing applications such as EC, Business-to-Business (B2B), and Business-to-Commerce (B2C). It also discusses the effect of cyber attacks and the counter measures to restrict them and the issues of information and cyber security, cybercrime, the lawful and unlawful intercept of information flowing over the internet, profiling and information privacy concerns.

Universal Designated-Verifier Partially Blind Signatures for E-Commerce

Blind signature schemes can prevent the information of a signature and message pair from leaking to the signer. Partially blind signature is a signature of which the message containing some information agreed by the signer and the signature requester is in an unblinded form. To protect the privacy of partially blind signature holders from leaking out by verifiers, we introduced universal designated-verifier partially blind signatures, in which any holder of a partially blind signature can convert the partially blind signature into a designated-verifier signature. Given the designated-verifier signature, only the designated verifier can verify that the message is signed by the signer, but he is unable to convince anyone else of this fact. In this paper, we also proposed a universal designated-verifier partially blind signature scheme from bilinear pairings based on Chow et al.’s public key infrastructure (PKI)-based partially blind signature scheme. Finally, we illustrate the application of the universal designated-verifier partially blind signatures that they can be used in untraceable electronic commerce systems and other trust negotiation systems.

Rule-Based Cooperation of Distributed EC Systems

Emergent requests or urgent information among enterprises require their intimate collaboration in B2B EC (electronic commerce). This paper analyzes the needs of intimate cooperation of distributed EC systems in terms of business contracts and presents an active rule-based methodology of close cooperation among EC systems and an active rule component to support it. Since the rule component provides high level rule patterns and event-based immediate processing, system administrators and programmers can easily program and maintain intimate cooperation of distributed EC systems independently to the application logic. The proposed active rule component facilitates HTTP protocol. Its prototype is implemented in B2B EC environment and evaluated using basic trigger facility of a commercial DBMS.

Mobile and Electronic Commerce Systems and Technologies

The emergence of wireless and mobile networks has made possible the introduction of electronic commerce to a new application and research subject: mobile commerce. Understanding or constructing a mobile or an electronic commerce system is an arduous task because the system involves a wide variety of disciplines and technologies and the technologies are constantly changing. To facilitate understanding and constructing such a system, this article divides the system into six components: (i) applications, (ii) client computers or devices, (iii) mobile middleware, (iv) wireless networks, (v) wired networks, and (vi) host computers. Elements in these components specifically related to the subject are described in detail and lists of current technologies for component construction are discussed. Another important and complicated issue related to the subject is the mobile or electronic commerce application programming. It includes two types of programming: client-side and server-side programming, which will be introduced too.

Alambic: a privacy-preserving recommender system for electronic commerce

Recommender systems enable merchants to assist customers in finding products that best satisfy their needs. Unfortunately, current recommender systems suffer from various privacy-protection vulnerabilities. Customers should be able to keep private their personal information, including their buying preferences, and they should not be tracked against their will. The commercial interests of merchants should also be protected by allowing them to make accurate recommendations without revealing legitimately compiled valuable information to third parties. We introduce a theoretical approach for a system called Alambic, which achieves the above privacy-protection objectives in a hybrid recommender system that combines content-based, demographic and collaborative filtering techniques. Our system splits customer data between the merchant and a semi-trusted third party, so that neither can derive sensitive information from their share alone. Therefore, the system could only be subverted by a coalition between these two parties.

A knowledge-based intelligent electronic commerce system for selling agricultural products

This paper presents a knowledge-based intelligent e-commerce system for selling agricultural products. The KIES system not only provides agricultural products sales, financial analysis and sales forecasting, but also provides feasible solutions or actions based on the results of rule-based reasoning. The intelligent system integrates a database, a rule base and a model base to create a tool of which managers can use to deal with decision-making problems via the Internet. Rules in the rule base are explained in detail to illustrate the processes of reasoning. Also, an automatic and practical inference engine that provides monitoring and controlling a verity of processes is presented to show how the system can deal with knowledge management. In order to obtain more profits and manage future change, artificial neural network models in the model base have been developed and compared for demand forecasting. Finally, for offering convenient delivery and user-friendly services to customers, an e-map combined with a GPS is used.

Software requirements and architecture modeling for evolving non-secure applications into secure applications

This paper describes an approach to modeling the evolution of non-secure applications into secure applications in terms of the software requirements model and software architecture model. The requirements for security services are captured separately from application requirements, and the security services are encapsulated in connectors in the software architecture, separately from the components providing functional services. The enterprise architecture is described in terms of use case models, static models, and dynamic models. The software architecture is described in terms of components and connectors, which can be deployed to distributed configurations. By separating application concerns from security concerns, the evolution from a non-secure application to a secure application can be achieved with less impact on the application. An electronic commerce system is described to illustrate the approach.

Experiment and Analysis for QoS of E-Commerce Systems

It is important for electronic commerce companies to understand the service quality of their systems, such as, the response time for users’ interactions, the service delay zone and the number of appropriate users accessing the systems concurrently. The accurate and prompt management of the service quality can greatly help build and operate systems more efficiently. In this paper we present a methodology for the service quality measurement and the user capacity modeling for electronic commerce systems. While most previous researches on this issue have been based on the closed-LAN environment, we conduct experiments under real network environment using sample e-Commerce systems. Specifically, we measure the response times for e-Commerce transactions under Cable, DSL, and wireless networks, and analyze the delay zones in processing the users’ service requests. The discrete event simulation and hybrid simulation are performed to estimate the maximum number of users using a response time limit as the service quality criterion. We also investigate the self-similar characteristics on the response time and the number of users, and the extensive results of the experiment and the simulations are described.

The formal-CAFE methodology and model checking patterns in the specification of e-commerce systems

Electronic commerce is an important application that has evolved significantly recently. However, electronic commerce systems are complex and difficult to be correctly designed. Guaranteeing the correctness of an e-commerce system is not an easy task due to the great amount of scenarios where errors occur, many of them very subtle. In this work we presents a methodology that uses formal-method techniques, specifically symbolic model checking, to design electronic commerce applications and to automatically verify them. Also, a model checking pattern hierarchy has been developed--it specifies patterns to construct and verify the formal model of e-commerce systems. We consider this research the first step to the development of a framework, which will integrate the methodology, an e-commerce specification language based on business rules, and a model checker.

Information technology and systems justification: A review for research and applications

Information technology (IT) such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID), wireless, the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW), and Information Systems (IS) such as Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce) systems and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have had tremendous impact in education, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, retailing, pure services, and even war. Many organizations turned to IT/IS to help them achieve their goals; however, many failed to achieve the full potential of IT/IS. These failures can be attributed at least in part to a weak link in the planning process. That weak link is the IT/IS justification process. The decision-making process has only grown more difficult in recent years with the increased complexity of business brought about by the rapid growth of supply chain management, the virtual enterprise and E-business. These are but three of the many changes in the business environment over the past 10–12 years. The complexities of this dynamic new business environment should be taken into account in IT/IS justification. We conducted a review of the current literature on IT/IS justification. The purpose of the literature review was to assemble meaningful information for the development of a framework for IT/IS evaluation that better reflects the new business environment. A suitable classification scheme has been proposed for organizing the literature reviewed. Directions for future research are indicated.