Communities in Electronic Commerce: Concepts, Models and Formal Aspects - Introduction

Communities are perceived to be a critical success factor of Electronic Commerce. Communities are characterized in terms of their common language, semantics, ontologies as well as their organization, the communication protocols, or processes. Examples of communities are: Topic-centered communities or communities of interest in electronic marketing, e.g., readers communities at Amazon.com, The Well, Dreamworks. Communities of value chains as found in virtual enterprises; e.g., single product manufacturing consortia, flexible consumer-driven organization of global supply chains, Open-EDI trading communities Communities for setting standards, e.g. Linux, Corba, WWW consortium, Open Trading on the Internet (OTP), EDI/XML. In fact, a community in electronic commerce demand for adequate concepts as well as adequate models. Those concepts and models have to be explored and then formalized for building platforms as well as for building artificial agents. This minitrack covers a variety of novel concepts, models and formalizations for communities. This minitrack deals with: Models to describe communities and their aspects relevant for Electronic Commerce: conceptual frameworks, organizational models, cognitive models, Belief, Desire and Intention (BDI) models, multi-agent systems, formalizations, as, e.g., logical models. Modeling concepts or notions for virtual communities as constituted by communication platforms, e.g., coordination, trust and fraud management, normative values. Modeling how new communities are brought about and maintained on the Internet and how different communication languages, protocols or platforms create different types of communities. Modeling the new communities in computational models; i.e., formal methods and formal models, implementations or general computer architectures. The first session of this minitrack comprises three papers on strategic issues in communities in electronic commerce and the implementation of platforms. Quentin Jones gives an analysis of communities, the communication within