Transactions and Electronic Commerce

Electronic Commerce is a rapidly growing area that is gaining more and more importance not only in the interrelation of businesses (business{to{business Electronic Commerce) but also in the everyday consumption of individuals performed via the Internet (business{to{ customer Electronic Commerce). Since Electronic Commerce is a very interdisciplinary area, it has a lot of impacts to various communities. The goal of this paper is to identify and to summarize the impact of Electronic Commerce from a database transaction point of view and to highlight open problems in transaction management arising in Electronic Commerce applications by reeecting the discussions of the working group \Transactions and Electronic Commerce" held at the TDD Workshop. 1 Motivation The exchange of electronic data between companies has been an important issue in business interactions for quite a while. However, the recent proliferation of the Internet together with the rapid propagation of personal computers led to an enormous diversiication and an ubiquity of businesses performed electronically. Since various participants, all having diierent requirements, operating in diierent, distributed and heterogeneous environments, etc., are encompassed in Electronic Commerce interactions, a couple of problems arise in this context. This aaects communication infrastructures as well as business models and cryptography but also aspects of information management, information integration, and transaction processing. In the latter case, fair interactions between all participants in the presence of potentially malicious parties, or the enforcement of complex business processes with certain transactional execution guarantees, all to be supported in an holistic way by an appropriate Electronic Commerce infrastructure are examples of problems to be dealt with in order to provide feasible solutions. The paper summarizes the working group \Transactions and Electronic Com-merce" held at the TDD'99 workshop 1 and points out the beneets transactions 1 The participants of this working group were (in alphabetical order):