Middleware Support for Non-repudiable Transactional Information Sharing between Enterprises

Enterprises increasingly use the Internet to offer their own services and to utilise the services of others. An extension of this trend is Internet-based collaboration between enterprises to form virtual enterprises for the delivery of goods or services. Effective formation of a virtual enterprise will require information sharing across organisational boundaries. Despite the requirement to share information, the autonomy and privacy requirements of enterprises must not be compromised. This demands strict policing of inter-enterprise interactions, including non-repudiable access to shared information. For a member of a virtual enterprise, a typical requirement is the ability to inspect/modify shared information together with member-speci c private information within a single ACID transaction. At the same time, inspection/modi cation of the shared information should both generate non-repudiation evidence and be consistent with policies agreed by the enterprises. The paper describes how information sharing middleware can be enhanced with distributed transaction support to perform regulated, transactional information sharing. Design and implementation of a prototype Java middleware is presented.