A collaborative and user-adaptive architecture enabling seamless cross-domain e-commerce transactions

Abstract

During the last years, e-Business has become widely accepted in all different industry segments. By adopting systems that allow for business transactions to be conducted electronically rather than paper-based, users can significantly reduce the effort for dataprocessing, increase business data accuracy and may even discover new business models or partners. However, the penetration of such systems is still remarkably low especially among small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) and very small enterprises (VSEs). Often, they do neither have the capacity to build tailored solutions allowing for conducting business with their partners over the web nor the necessary capabilities. Also, existing standards and solutions mostly do not adequately support flexible, cross-domain collaboration. Mostly, they do not account for changing user needs and only provide industry-specific protocols and data formats. In the frame of the EU-funded GENESIS project, we develop a novel e-Business framework that enables SMEs and VSEs (in the following referred to as users) to perform business transactions over the web, by interconnecting their individual, existing software applications with those of the collaborating parties. Thereby, we focus on seamless, cross-domain interoperability and adaptivity to changing user needs in order to facilitate the adoption of eBusiness solutions.