E-commerce

Period: period 1 (2 september - 11 november 2004),
Teacher: Frank (Dr FPM) Dignum
E-mail: dignum@cs.uu.nl
NEWS

Last class is on Monday, November 1.

The fourth assignment is available below. Deadline is October 29!

The fifth assignment is also available.

Target group:  Students from the ACI and MBI Masters or other master programs from computer science or information sciences
Content: The aim of the course is to introduce some of the more fundamental aspects of electronic business to the students. The course is not a complete overview of the area, but concentrates on a number of technical aspects of modeling electronic business processes and touches upon some opportunities for the use of agents. 
For many people e-commerce is equivalent to the development of websites for business transactions. Although this certainly is part of e-commerce it is mainly related to constructing interactive programs which is tought in the course on Internet programming and some other programming courses.
In this course I will discuss a number of aspects that are less known, but probably as interesting for computer scientists and arguably even more important for the organizations that should use the systems. After a general introduction in e-commerce the course will consist of three components. The first component will treat trade procedures. If a company is automating its trade procedures it tends to skip steps and even intermediaries. We will check how the new procedures can be modeled correctly and how we can verify that they are trustworthy.
The second component consists of some of the most frequent interactions between the trading partners. First we will discuss the concept of virtual markets. The other aspect that we will discuss is the change of electronic data interchange (EDI) to OpenEDI and the use of ebXML. 
In the last component of the course we will discuss the searching and comparison between catalogs on the WWW. We will also discuss some tools to make the catalogs accessible through the Web.
results: The results will be made available through e-mail and partly through this web-site
Assessment: The students will be assessed through 5 assignments. The final mark of the course will be the average mark of these assignments
The assignments are all related to a case study. 
The assignments can be done in groups of 2-4 students. 
With every assignment I expect a report with an argumentation of the choices that have been made.
The assigments should be submitted by e-mail. 
  1. Assignment 1
    1. Design the structure and processes for the store front
    2. Deadline: September 20
  2. Assignment 2 
    1. Design the processes for payment and delivery of the products.
    2. Deadline: October 4 
  3. Assignment 3 
    1. Design and implement the catalog and integrate the product data of the suppliers.
    2. PHP files with examples and start for assignment.
    3. Example SQL script to create a database
    4. Deadline: October 22
  4. Assignment 4  
    1. Design the messages for the ordering process
    2. The zip file with the message DTD's
    3. Deadline: October 29
  5. Assignment 5
    1. Extend the website
    2. Agent software that can be used for option c.
    3. Deadline: November 12
Literature: Unfortunately there is no book that covers all the material of this course (and believe me, I have searched a lot!). 
Recommended is: R. Kalakota & A. Whinston, "Frontiers of Electronic Commerce", Addison Wesley, 1996. It is a bit old, but still gives a good overview of the technical basics of EC.
To compensate for the lack of a book, below are some more links to articles, books and websites:
  1.  Center for research in EC
  2.  EC platform Nederland (ECP.NL) 
  3.  Enabling EC 
  4. International Journal on Electronic Commerce
  5. International Journal on Electronic Markets
  6. The Fishmarket
  7. The trading agent competition
  8. Emediator
  9. more information on auctions and electronic markets (theory)
  10. links to auctions and markets
During the course articles and book chapters will be used as basis material. Below are links to all the material that is required. 
It is recommended to read this literature per week as preparation for the assignments because it closely related to the presentations. 
  1. Literature for Process modelling:
    1.  Open Electronic Commerce, R. Lee, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam 
    2.  Distributed electronic trade scenarios, R. Lee, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam 
    3.  trustworthy trade procedures, R. Bons, F. Dignum, R. Lee, Y.-H. Tan 
  2. Literature for virtual markets and interactions:
    1. Business modells for electronic markets
    2. MAGMA: an EC market architecture
    3. An introduction of auctions 
    4. A more economical introduction on the theory of auctions
    5. Building Internet auctions
    6. Issues in designing auctions
    7. Auctions and negotiations
    8. Strategies on the Fishmarket
  3. Literature for XML and XSLT
    1. Literature on XML etc
    2. Literature on XSLT etc.
  4. Literature for catalogs, searching 
    1. catalogs and data-integration
    2. searching the Web
    3. searching in context
    4. concept based search
  5. Literature for agents and electronic commerce
    1. roadmap for agents and EC
    2. Dutch article on agents and EC
Description: The course contains the following topics (links will be provided to presentations);
  1. Introduction to e-commerce (concepts, hype and reality)
  2. Process modelling 
  3. Representation and integration of data for EC 
  4. Virtual markets and auctions
  5. Personalisation, searching and agents