Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
11
Applications of WSMO
A new technology can only be justified by successful application. Although
WSMO is a relative new approach, there are already a few realized application
scenarios. This chapter depicts some existing applications in the areas of e-
commerce, e-government, and e-banking that have been developed mainly
in joint academic and industrial efforts. We discuss the technical challenges
in each area, and outline how semantically enabled Web service technology
allows advanced support for these.
11.1 E-Commerce
E-commerce is a collective term for IT-based support for trading and bargain-
ing between companies and end-consumers, as well as between enterprises.
The former is commonly referred to as business-to-customer (B2C), and the
latter as business-to-business (B2B) commerce. In both areas, technical sup-
port is evidently important, in order to ease processing of orders, provide
sophisticated customer support, or manage industrial supply chains [114]. In-
numerable technical solutions for both B2C and B2B commerce exist that
have become an irreplaceable asset of today's business world - from sim-
ple automated cash machines offered by nearly every financial institution or
electronic billing systems for accounting support, to automated just-in-time
supply chain management systems in the automotive manufacturing industry.
The Internet provides a novel infrastructure for e-commerce that is world-
wide accessible and easy to handle. Its growth and proliferation during the last
decade has led to a tremendous development of new, Web-based e-commerce
technologies. Nowadays, hardly any enterprise is without a professionally man-
aged homepage that provides general information and, very often, also cus-
tomer support. The dot-com hype in the late 1990s has given us numerous
applications for B2C commerce, development suites for Web-based shopping
and auction systems, and even novel business models for commerce on the
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