MMM-towards an infrastructure for emerging electronic commerce applications

"Simple" electronic commerce applications, such as online ordering of books, online scheduling and booking of flights, and online banking have found widespread deployment and acceptance. More complex electronic commerce applications, however, such as the online use of highly specialized computational packages and online cooperative design are not gaining market momentum yet. We attribute this to the lack of a common computational infrastructure specifically targeting the integration of heterogeneous information services that specifically address the requirements of evolving electronic commerce applications. We have built a computational infrastructure to address these issues and present a thorough account of the lessons learned from the design, the implementation, and the deployment of this infrastructure for several online applications.