12th International Workshop on Research Issues in Data Engineering: Engineering E-Commerce/E-Business Systems (RIDE'02)
Downloadable Service Contracts for Disconnected Transactions
San Jose, California
February 24-February 25
ISBN: 0-7695-1480-4
Client participation in all web-based services, e.g., shopping in online stores, creating service agreements as in buying a car insurance, currently demands browser based online operations with on-the-spot decision making. In contrast, organizational (business-to-business) procurement relies on complex decision making software at each end for comparison shopping and/or satisfying various organization specific goals. Supporting disconnected operations for business-to-consumer scenario can introduce some of the same benefits at the individual consumer level. In this paper, we propose the concept of a downloadable service contract, that specifies unambiguous rules of interaction between an end client and a service provider. The client initially negotiates with the service provider a contract, which is subsequently used not only to guide off-line client operations, but also for validating at the service provider the log of actions, i.e., a purchase order, submitted by the client. A generic application program for browsing a downloaded contract and creating an order, may be made available by the service providers. However, a client may have its own software with many value-added services such as comparison shopping across multiple contracts, matching complex user specific goals and maintenance of interaction histories. We describe a prototype system that extends the current Ariba cXML protocol for MRO procurement.
Index Terms:
service contracts, disconnected transactions, comparison shopping, contract negotiation, business-to-consumer(B2C)
Citation:
Sidharth Choudhury, Asit Dan, "Downloadable Service Contracts for Disconnected Transactions," ride, pp.0112, 12th International Workshop on Research Issues in Data Engineering: Engineering E-Commerce/E-Business Systems (RIDE'02), 2002