The Internet and the proliferation of inexpensive computing power in the form of clusters of workstations or PCs provide the basic hardware infrastructure for business-to-business electronic commerce in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Unfortunately, the corresponding software infrastructure is still missing. In this paper, we show a way to develop appropriate tools for electronic commerce by describing the approach we have taken in the WISE (Workflow-based Internet SErvices) project. The goals of WISE are to develop and deploy the software infrastructure that is necessary to support business-to-business electronic commerce in the form of virtual enterprises. The idea is to combine the tools and services of different companies as building blocks of a higher-level system in which a process acts as the blueprint for control and data flow within the virtual enterprise. From this idea, the final goal is to build the basic support for an Internet trading community where enterprises can join their services to provide value-added processes.
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