Andreas Bartelt

A Multi-criteria Taxonomy of Business Models in Electronic Commerce

Looking at the ongoing evolution in electronic commerce there are more and more business models becoming significant. E-shops, e-auctions or e-tendering are not the only possibilities for a company to be active in electronic commerce. This article presents many relevant business models and systematically classifies them. Mainly the classification is based on the type of business subjects like suppliers, customers and mediators and their active or passive role as initiators and carrier of a business model. Another basis for the classification is the breakdown of the concept of electronic commerce and an explicit modeling. This allows to build up a taxonomy using multiple criteria and the presentation and subsumption of individual business models. The taxonomy can be used to analyze and enhance existing systems and business models as well as to develop new internet strategies for companies. An example of the implementation of the business model e-portal concludes the article.

Advanced concepts for next generation portals

Over the last two years, portal sites surfaced as a major trend in electronic commerce. Unlike many other exaggerated trends, portals have become an important facet of the World Wide Web which is likely to stay. Emerging from search engines and catalogues, they integrate an increasing amount of information and functionality. The paper reflects on portal characteristics as well as on foundations of their realization and introduces technology needed for the next generation service trading concepts: based on the promising open source project Jetspeed, a prototype of the GIBRALTAR service portal is introduced, capable of integrating, trading and composing complex remote e-services.

Tool-Supported Interpreter-Based User Interface Architecture for Ubiquitous Computing

With the upcoming era of Ubiquitous Computing (Ubi-Comp) new demands on software engineering will arise. Fundamental needs for constructing user interfaces (UIs) in the context of UbiComp were identified and the subsumed results of a survey with special focus on model based user interface development environments (MB-UIDEs) are presented in this paper. It can be stated, that none of the examined systems is suitable for all the needs. Therefore a new architecture based on the Arch model is proposed, that supports the special UbiComp requirements. This layered architecture provides the desired flexibility with respect to different implementation techniques and UI modalities. It was implemented in a user interface development environment called Vesuf. Its usability was approved within the Global Info project [20], where heterogeneous services had to be integrated in a web portal.

Agent-oriented concepts to foster the automation of e-business

Improving the efficiency of e-business usage requires the further development of automation techniques for interorganizational business processes as a major driver. Automation can be employed at various stages and application areas of e-business. The innovative concepts and enabling technologies we argue for in this context are automated negotiation, dynamic interoperability between standards, completeness, trust between business partners and graded anonymity. These agent-oriented areas strongly contribute to automated systems in e-business and their acceptance by users. We conclude with the presentation of the relationship between current agent technology and the suggested basic concepts for the automation of e-business.

Vesuf, eine modellbasierte User Interface Entwicklungsumgebung für das Ubiquitous Computing

Zur systematischen Erstellung von User Interfaces fur Applikationen im Kontext des Ubiquitous Computing wird eine innovative Entwicklungsumgebung vorgestellt. Diese erlaubt es, Applikationen auf einfache deklarative Weise mit verschiedenen User Interface Modalitaten auszustatten und auf Basis abstrakter Modelle fur jede Modalitat eine optimale Schnittstelle zu konstruieren, ohne die Fachlogik modifizieren zu mussen. Um die Tragfahigkeit der Konzepte und die praktische Einsatzfahigkeit des Systems nachzuweisen, wurden exemplarisch heterogene Dienste in ein Internetportal integriert.