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This document describes the current W3C activities related to Electronic Commerce for the purpose of assessing the Consortium's future role in ecommerce-related work. It presents the work within the W3C Electronic Commerce Activity and across all W3C Activities which are directly related to Electronic Commerce. We expect this paper to serve as the basis for a discussion of W3C's role in ecommerce arena and, in particular, the future of the Electronic Commerce Interest Group.
This document is a NOTE made available by the W3C for discussion only.
Publication of this Note by W3C indicates no endorsement by W3C or the W3C
Team, or any W3C Members. This Note may be updated, replaced or rendered
obsolete by other W3C documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use W3C
Notes as reference material or to cite them as other than "work in progress".
This document has been produced as part of the
W3C Electronic Commerce
Activity.
Members are welcome to send detailed comments on this document to the mailing
list of the Electronic Commerce Interest Group
(w3c-ecommerce-ig@w3.org and
archives
[Member restricted]). We cannot guarantee a personal response, but we will
try when it is appropriate.
Depending on the response from interested/affected W3C Working Groups and
from the W3C Members at large, submitters' suggestions will be brought to
the attention of the Electronic Commerce
Interest Group for further work on Electronic Commerce issues.
A list of current W3C technical reports and publications, including Working
Drafts and Notes, can be found at
http://www.w3.org/TR.
An major factor in the evolution of the Web is Electronic Commerce: the ability to buy, sell, and advertise goods and services to customers and consumers. One concern in the development of Electronic Commerce on the Web is the trust that can be placed in the provenance, reliability, security and privacy of information available from or transferred over the internet. Another concern is the need for low friction commerce transactions allowing quality and ease of use for consumers, a key factor the future of Electronic Commerce. The potential for global electronic commerce is immense; much of this potential is and will be realized by the continued development of Web technologies. The World Wide Web Consortium, leading the web to its full potential, is therefore concerned with the evolution of Electronic Commerce on the Web. The role of W3C is to focus on core infrastructure technologies for Electronic Commerce and identify common infrastructure needed in this area. W3C is not committed for example in specifying banking systems nor schemas for specific Electronic Commerce applications.
W3C, through the following activities is committed to key factors for success
in the evolution of Electronic Commerce:
Activities related to Electronic Commerce are widely spread across the all World Wide Web Consortium. The Electronic Commerce Activity is the core framework in this area, but other activities within W3C are also involved in Electronic Commerce like in the Technology & Society Domain which has addressed different issues on privacy, security, and content control that are major concerns in Electronic Commerce and for the web of trust. Therefore, technologies specified in the Technology & Society Domain, Architecture Domain and User interface Domain are precious for the development and for the future of Electronic Commerce. The Consortium is committed in the following Electronic Commerce related topics:
The Electronic Commerce Activity is of course dedicated to this area. It hosts an Electronic Commerce Interest Group serving as a forum to explore cooperation and exchange ideas. This Interest Group has lead to the creation of Working Groups for the Micropayment Initiative and the Electronic Payment Initiative.
The Electronic Commerce Interest Group is a forum designed to allow the members to evaluate potential Web technologies in the Electronic Commerce area and to share information with the Consortium staff and other members about:
The Electronic Commerce Interest Group has met three times in the last two years, in Brussels, Seattle, and Paris. There is an on-going email list (w3c-ecommerce-ig@w3.org and archives [Member restricted]) associated with the Interest Group which is from its beginning very quiet.
The Electronic Commerce Activity is currently involved in realizing the
opportunities in
Micropayments, and
this has formed the main task of the Activity for the last 12 months.
Micropayments are
very small payments made over the Web for documents that you access.
Micropayments cover transactions which are too small to be economical as
credit card transactions, and can be as little as a fraction of a cent.
Micropayments provide an alternative to subscription and advertising as a
source of revenue. The Micropayments Initiative hosts two Working Groups:
The
Micropayment
Markup Working Group [Member restricted]: The embedding of payment
information in Web pages. This specification provides an extensible way to
embed in a Web page all the information necessary to initialize a micropayment.
The
Micropayments
API Working Group [Member restricted]: The API to start the wallet and
transfer the information defined above to the wallet for processing.
The Joint Electronic Payment Initiative (JEPI) was a primary initiative in the Electronic Commerce Activity. It has addressed a standardized way of automatable negotiating payment methods between browsers and servers on the Web.
The Metadata Activity is the architectural underpinning of many of the Technology and Society activities. W3C's work on Digital Signatures, Privacy Protection, and Intellectual Property Rights Management are all based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) work that is at the heart of the Metadata Activity. Recently, in the Electronic Commerce activity, the Common Markup for Micropayment Per-fee-links specification has suggested to use the RDF metadata technology for describing micropayments information.
One element of trust in Electronic Commerce is the ability to reliably
associate a statement with the person or organization who made it. While
the underlying cryptographic technology to accomplish this is available and
widely known, it has not yet been applied to a general-purpose system for
creating machine readable statements. The Digital Signature Initiative
(DSig) fills this important role by
specifying how to sign statements expressed as metadata.
Another element of trust is the ability to digitally sign Web resources and
portions of protocol messages (anything referenciable by a URI) and procedures
for computing and verifying such signatures. It is the mission of the
XML-Signature WG to develop an
XML compliant syntax for such mechanism.
Electronic Commerce involves the constant tension between the need for a merchant site to gain information about their costumers and the need for these individuals to control the release of this information to others. The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) addresses the twin goals of meeting the data privacy expectations of consumers on the Web while assuring that the medium remains available and productive for Electronic Commerce. Following the principle of providing consumers notice of site privacy polices, and allowing users to express and act upon their privacy preferences in a flexible manner, one goal enhances the success of the other. In addition, P3P provides a mechanism developing standard, extensible data sets of personal information to be transferred between user agents and servers,
The Platform for Internet Content Selection
(PICS) was created as an alternative
model to centralized government controls on indecent content. PICS encourages
decentralized parental empowerment when addressing children's access to
inappropriate material.
PICS is a pair of protocols that allows labels to be applied to Internet
content. These protocols empower any individual or organization to design
and distribute labels reflecting their views about the content. PICS was
spearheaded by the Consortium as a practical alternative to global governmental
censorship of the Internet. In addition, the same technology facilitates
searching the Web, and providing a foundation for establishing trust in
information on the Web.
The W3C is considering the issue of making it easier for users to comply with Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policies. Combining payment and labeling technologies will make it simple for IP owners to express the terms and conditions related to their materials, and for users to comply with the stated policies. Business policies are extremely important to the development of the Electronic Commerce.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) will
play an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of
data on the Web, especially in Business to Business Electronic Commerce and
Electronic Data Interchange.
In addition to the XML, the
XML Schema Working Group
is addressing means for defining the structure, content and semantics
of such XML documents. The
XML Schema Requirements
document specifies the purpose, basic usage scenarios, design principles,
and base requirements for an XML schema language.
Technical common specifications as standards are critical to the long term
Electronic Commerce success on the Internet as they can allow products and
services from different vendors to work together. They also encourage competition
and reduce uncertainty in the global marketplace. W3C, as a global and neutral
technology development forum, develops common specifications for the
Web in areas such as network protocols, graphical user interface, allowing
reliability, interoperability, ease of use and scalability in Electronic
Commerce on the web.
The Consortium is also working towards making information on the Web accessible
to all kind of devices such as mobiles phones
(Mobile Access) and television
(TVWeb), therefore
extending the access range for consumers to Electronic Commerce.
W3C Member organizations may submit submissions to propose technology or
other ideas for consideration by W3C. W3C has
acknowledged Submissions from
Members that are related to the Electronic Commerce area. These submissions
were brought to the attention of the participants in the Electronic Commerce
Interest Group for consideration. Related Working Group are invited to pick
up these Submissions for discussion as requirements and design input.
These documents are also made available to the public for consideration.
Following is a non exhaustive list of resources related to Electronic Commerce:
W3C work on Web technologies has an an important enabling impact on Electronic Commerce. Members requesting Submission Acknowledgment from W3C have obviously demonstrated their interest in the Electronic Commerce area. Though the Electronic commerce Activity is currently working on Micropayments, we have to envision the future of this activity. Based on reaction to this document, we will consider hosting a face-to-face meeting of the Electronic Commerce Interest Group shortly. Members are welcome to join the mailing list for the Electronic Commerce Interest Group. To do so, please send mail to w3c-ecommerce-ig-request@w3.org. Members are, as always, invited to suggest new Web technologies to explore and to demonstrated their motivation related to Electronic Commerce.