Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Web. Three thriving examples are Amazon (
www.amazon.com
) which pro-
vides Web-based distribution of consumer goods, Ebay (
www.ebay.com
)an
auction system on the Internet, and travel-booking services such as Expe-
dia (
www.expedia.com
). These are widely used B2C commerce solutions with
remarkable market appraisal, last but not least due to the price advantages
offered [78].
However, current Web-based commerce solutions suffer from the deficien-
cies of current Web technologies that have been outlined in Part I of this
book. That is, automated processing of Web-content is awkward owing to
unstructured information representation and non semantically defined termi-
nologies. Because of this, existing e-commerce solutions deal with proprietary
data structures and make tremendous efforts to integrate information from
Web-applications with existing back-end systems for inventory or customer
management. Although automated information interchange over the Inter-
net is possible via SOAP and XML, the usage of Web service technologies
is restricted to certain application scenarios with well-defined data and com-
munication structures. In order to illustrate how Semantic Web service tech-
nologies, and especially WSMO, can be applied beneficially to overcome these
deficiencies, we shall now present the modeling of the Amazon e-commerce
service in WSMO in order to allow automated usage for B2C commerce, and
then present a WSMO-based solution for application integration within the
telecommunication sector as an example of a B2B commerce scenario.
11.1.1 B2C - The Amazon E-Commerce Web Service
As its contributing to the development of innovative e-commerce technologies
based on Web services, Amazon provides a set of Web services that allows
direct access to the Amazon technology platform (Amazon Web Services, see:
http://www.amazon.com
). Among the Web services, the Amazon e-commerce
service (ECS) provides access to Amazon's own e-commerce functionalities for
use as a building block for e-commerce applications.
Overview of the ECS Web Service
ECS exposes Amazon's product data and e-commerce functionality to help
developers, web site owners, and merchants to leverage the data and func-
tionality that Amazon uses to run its own e-commerce business. It offers the
following functionalities: searching the Amazon catalog, looking up data for
specific products, getting customer feedback for non-Amazon vendors, setting
up shopping carts, and looking up customers' wish lists and registries.
Through ECS, developers can access and deal with the following infor-
mation: product data, including information about product availability and
pricing for items in the Amazon catalog; content from customers such as re-
views and wish lists, and “seller information, for instance general information
and customer feedback about the wide range of vendors on the Amazon site. In
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