1. Research Issues in Business-to- business E-commerce Allen Brown Microsoft Corporation

2. Is this unprecedented? Revolutionary? No Some industries (like aerospace) have conducted e-commerce along their supply chains for decades. These traditional e-commerce relationships are/were static and expensive to establish.

3. What is new? The Web has changed expectations. E-commercial relationships should be amenable to creation/destruction completely dynamically and cheaply. Delayed binding -- the what and how of an e-commercial relationship to be established at “run time” rather than “compile time”.

4. The evolution of the basis for e- commerce Businesses interoperate through their applications Interoperation among applications has been difficult -- especially without a priori knowledge A loosening of binding: –Shared databases –Shared object models –Shared message models

5. XML and XML schemata -- the basis for interoperation Message-mediated information interchange and workflow control Descriptive basis for object-modeling from the programming perspective Descriptive basis for data-modeling from the persistent storage and retrieval perspective

6. Message/document models Developing industry specific schemata Enriching the semantic repertoire Describing message-to-message transformations Scalable message processing

7. Object Models XML schemata to object descriptions Object descriptions to XML schemata Augmenting the usual notions of aggregation in object models

8. Storage Models How to treat XML as data How to treat traditional data as XML How to gracefully integrate OO programming with an XML mediated database