Architectural Solutions to Agent-Enabling E-Commerce Portals with Pull/Push Abilities

摘要

The enormous diversity and choices of goods and services across the Internet, as well as the dynamic nature of e-commerce, could overwhelm clients, deter them, and make their transaction decisions less effective. Transaction agents are attracting ever increasing attention in the industry and research community as a tool to aid in the automation of a client's e-business experience and reduce the transaction decision-making complexity. This research adopts Web services and middleware technologies to provide bi-directional communication channels between network-blind generic transaction agents and existing e-commerce portals with no modification to their existing functions. A novel scheme is proposed to support delayed transactions, which are critical in e-business marketplaces like e-auction or scenarios where delaying a transaction may increase the value proposition to the human user. An action-word-based translation system is used to bridge the semantic gap between the agents and the e-business portals. This research also contributes two reusable software components as its generic client-side agent support system and its portal callback tier.