Modeldriven Applications for Electronic Commerce : Evaluating use of Application Readable Models

Abstract

The increasing use of the Internet and Web technology is met with an enormous focus on e-business. Various Internet solutions based on Web shops, web portals and marketplaces are emerging constantly. A lot is designed to be used by the market of consumers, but solutions for conducting businesses between enterprises and towards public purchasing are also emerging.

Enterprises that will start to use e-business have a lot of electronic solutions to choose among. Depending of whom they shall communicate with, it will be necessary to do certain adjustments and choices of technologies. These are often done in terms of the customer. With a huge number of business partners a few enterprises in worst case can have to handle several different electronic solutions. The result of this is that a lot of enterprise decline to start using e-business.

Therefore it is a big challenge to succeed in co-existence and combined service between the different solutions and the different technology platforms.

This thesis will give an introduction to the B2B environment and present a system for how a business application can be enabled to take part in electronic business transactions as part of a business collaboration without having to be the subject of a long and costly initial implementation and not having to mind the technology being used in the other end .

This system involves making two or more collaborating applications produce, interpret and process the contents of exchanged message data on the basis of the semantics of a common reference model.