A web services-based business interactions manager to support electronic commerce applications

Electronic commerce applications (e-commerce) need connecting technologies to support the external, agreed-upon or flexible business processes. This requires a specification of these types of business processes with a business interactions and connection-oriented perspective in order to compose them from the existing assets of the enterprise, partners, and suppliers. This work advocates a conceptualization of the business interactions perspective (of a business modeling) as an approach to specify: (1) the business processes as abstract (virtual) entities implemented as dynamic connections among actual entities that are the business functions and objects (as implemented in the inter-organizational information systems), and (2) the requirements for a connecting technology, that is Web services, to make it an enabler of two categories of e-commerce interactions: B2C and B2B.The approach consists of: (1) abstracting, specifying (in terms of activities), and categorizing the business interactions into enterprise, customers, suppliers, and partners' interactions, (2) insulating the core business activities from the interaction activities to make these two types of activities independent, (3) dedicating to the interaction activities a specific artifact termed business interactions manager (BIM), (3) specifying the functionality of the BIM. This specification aims at overcoming the limitations of the current technologies, especially the de facto connecting technology, that is Web services, in order to specify a Web services-based BIM as a backbone of Web services-oriented architecture (WSOA), and (4) implementing a specific instance of the Web services-based BIM for each category of e-commerce with regard to the business specifics.The paper proposes guidance for deploying WSOA enabler of e-commerce through steady instantiations of the Web services-based BIM.