Ebook: Techniques and Applications for Mobile Commerce

Electronic business in general and mobile commerce in particular offers a new roadmap for a business enterprise to gain strategic competitive advantages through up-to-date information and technology management. For mobile workers it offers a new avenue for a new knowledge-based economy, building upon the advanced hardware and software technologies.

Mobile Commerce M-Commerce comprises applications and services that are accessible from Internet-enabled mobile devices. It involves new technologies, services, and business models. While it is different from traditional e-Commerce it can also be seen as an extension of e-Commerce in the sense that it, among others, makes e-Commerce available in a modern way to new application areas and to a new set of customers.

The Internet is on its way to leave traces in all aspects of our life independently of where we are. Already today, mobile phones and PDAs become an indispensable part of our life as a source for all kinds of information and services and, especially, as our permanently available interface to our environment. Very soon they will turn into widespread intelligent assistants capable of anticipating many of our wishes and needs, such as automatically arranging for taxis to come and pick us up after business meetings or providing us with summaries of relevant news and messages left by colleagues. But, for all these changes to happen, key issues of interoperability, usability, security, and privacy still need to be addressed.

The Techniques and Applications for Mobile Commerce (TAMoCo) conference series is going to address these issues. It provides scientists, practitioners, and students a platform to discuss the latest trends in the exciting above mentioned areas.

This book is structured into three parts:

Part I: Wireless Technologies for the Extended Enterprise: Current State and Future Developments

The aim of part I is to analyse the state of the art and to stimulate discussions about future trends and technologies with respect to architectures that support business-to-employee and/or business-to-customer relations.

Nowadays, traditional office and business work is increasingly being performed in mobile environments, i.e. outside of offices, at the customer's location or on the road, where notebooks or handheld devices are used instead of PCs – often without access to high-bandwidth networks. However, users expect all services, information and tools they employ in their offices or at home to remain available to them in the mobile environment, too. Moreover, mobile solutions are expected to employ mobile technology with an added value regarding, e.g. personalization issues or context- and location-dependent information and services.

Part II: E-Service Environments: Aspect-Oriented Techniques and Mobile Devices

This part brings together approaches related to e-Services and/or mobile services and aspect-oriented techniques both from industry and academia. It provides an appropriate environment to discus the benefits of aspect-oriented techniques in e-Services systems, as well as in mobile environments, and problems and challenges that particularly arise during the practical combination of these fields.

Part III: AutoMoCo: Autonomic Computing and Mobile Commerce

Autonomic Computing is an area of research looking at imbuing software with dynamic behaviours based on its operating environment. In mobile commerce, autonomous behaviours could be used to help solve the issues of an ever-changing deployment environment, and the differing requirements for actors in commerce transactions. Since its introduction at the beginning of this millennium, autonomic computing has seen major uptakes by a range of communities including enterprise software developers, and grid computing groups to name just a few. In this part active researchers and practitioners will report on novel or ongoing research into autonomic computing and its application of mobile computing with focus on mobile commerce.

Acknowledgments

The organizers would like to express their gratitude to the authors, for submitting their work to TAMoCo 2008, and to the Program Committee, for providing very thorough evaluations of the submitted papers as well as for the discussions that followed under significant time constraints. We also would like to thank the invited speakers and the panel moderator for their efforts in contributing to the success of the conference.

On the organizational side a lot of people have been there from the start of these series and hence we thank them profusely. One of them is the Tilminator Mr. T. Bitterberg although we are not sure about his Lederhosen. Other highly supporting people include Mrs. MacDonald, Ms. Campbell, Ms. Watson, Lee, Darren and last but not least all the staff at Roderick Dhu and Ruarg.

TAMoCo Series Editors

Cherif Branki, University of the West of Scotland, Scotland, UK; Brian Cross, University of the West of Scotland, Scotland, UK; Rainer Unland, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany; Gerhard Wanner, University of Applied Sciences, Stuttgart, Germany

TAMoCo2008 PC-Chairs

Brian Cross, University of the West of Scotland, Scotland, UK; Fritz Laux, Reutlingen University, Germany

TAMoCo2008 Symposium Chairs

Gregorio Díaz, University of Castilla La Mancha, Spain; Peter Langendörfer, ihp microelectronics GmbH, Germany; Guadalupe Ortiz, University of Extremadura, Spain; Martin Randles, Liverpool John Moores University, UK; A. Taleb-Bendiab, Liverpool John Moores University, UK; Frank Teuteberg, University of Osnabrueck, Germany

The design of e-services requires software architects to analyze many domain-specific requirements; the required architectural decisions recur. Many of them are motivated by cross-cutting concerns such as security, transactionality, and reliability. The decision making is driven by many forces; no single design fits all purposes. Some of these concerns can be expressed as model- and code-level aspects; others are better tackled by more conservative implementation practices. In this talk, we present architectural decision modeling as an emerging technique to transform such architectural knowledge from tacit, tribal knowledge into an explicit, manageable form. We present a three-step decision making framework, which supports the semi-automatic identification of decisions in requirements models and the injection of decisions into model and code aspects. We outline a reusable decision model for service-oriented architecture and e-services design, currently being harvested from completed projects. We conclude with a call to action for further research.

The current market penetration of mobile phones in conjunction with an expected growth of m-commerce offers a high potential for the growth of m-payment over the next few years. Although research analysts have predicted that m-payments will gain a significant foothold in the coming years, the requisite high-speed data services and the desirable demand will not materialize overnight. In addition, a wide variety of m-payment technologies are available today, but the value of such services is not clear yet. In order to investigate some key issues related to m-payment from a user's perspective, this paper explores and presents the mobile users' opinions and estimations about these new services via a survey conducted among 315 students in the University of Ioannina, Greece.

Whenever e-commerce applications want to distribute XML data over mobile networks, the limitted battery power requires to reduce the amount of exchanged data. Therefore, we propose a technique to identify parts of the database that are more frequently queried than other parts, to cache these parts, and to reuse them for answering following queries.

In this paper, we present a data shipping strategy based on a segmentation of an XML database that not only reduces the amount of transferred data within the whole network, but also simplifies the method of testing whether an intermediate participant that routes a query can contribute to this query. Furthermore, we use the XMark benchmark for experimentally evaluating how the use of our segmentation within a typical mobile auction scenario can reduce the total amount of transferred data.

In the paper we consider a vehicle routing problem with time windows and real-time travel time information. We assume the deployment of an information and communication system that is based on mobile technologies. It provides a real-time mobile connection between the dispatching centre and the drivers, allows localizing the vehicles on road, and gives the overview over the current traffic conditions. Therefore, we explicitly incorporate into our consideration the possibility to react to some dynamic events like traffic impediments and divert a vehicle away from its current destination. To solve the problem we develop a genetic algorithm and test its performance on the well-known benchmarks. The quality of the received solutions is between −6.48% and 2.08% with the average quality −1.5% compared to the best known published results. The negative values indicate that our solutions are better than the corresponding best known, i.e. in majority of cases we outperform them.

Since years the market of mobile navigation systems is growing enormously. Within this paper the goals and first results of the joint project “Mobile Navigation with 3D City Models” (MoNa3D; http://www.mona3d.de) are introduced. The project consortium consists of the University of Applied Science Stuttgart (coordinator), the University of Applied Science Mainz, the University of Bonn and the four companies Navigon, Teleatlas, GTA Geoinformatik, and Heidelberg Mobil. The aim of the project is to develop and evaluate the support of landmarks and 3D visualization in mobile navigation systems for pedestrian navigation as well as the “last mile” car navigation for instance from a parking place to the final destination. The two main goals of the project are to provide a cognitive semantic route description by using landmarks and secondly to make use of synthetic building facade textures along with a corresponding compression system for an efficient storage, transfer, and rendereing of 3D urban models. This paper focuses on the synthetic texturing and compression.

Smart products are hybrids that merge tangible products with mobile information technologies. This opens up unprecedented opportunities for product designers and marketing manager for implementing adaptive and situation-aware product interfaces that generate dynamic communication behaviour with customers during the whole life-cycle of a single product. The realisation of this vision requires, beside others, expressive and machine-readable product representations and an open product information infrastructure. With Tip ‘n Tell we present an architecture that supports smart products. Product information is representedj by a coherent container model, called SPDO, that uses semantically annotated descriptions in OWL-DL format. Based on these elements we demonstrate services that allow finding multimedia content that fits to a product in focus based on a combination of DL-reasoning and RDF-based rule derivations. Similar products to a product in focus are determined by statistical similarity measures on feature level. Finally we present a logic-based service that determines compatible products.

This document describes the architecture of a generic GUI framework on mobile devices. In a client server system such a framework allows to display a user interface on a multitude of devices without any changes in the GUI description.

To achieve this goal an extended version of the model view controller (MVC) pattern is used in the form of a Java applet which communicates with its server via the http protocol.

The last section of this document elaborates on the special circumstances of client server applications on mobile devices.

Considerable parallels exist between what is commonly considered to constitute a good gaming or a good learning experience [8], which suggests the use of computer games in the education sector. We investigate the design of a resource management computer game (RMG) [5] to raise awareness for environmental issues. We argue that focusing on peoples attitude when investigating their behaviour is an established approach in psychology [1] and that the use of computer games in education is quickly becoming a common practice [3,2]. We present a prototype running on a mobile phone constructed to meet the identified requirements.

The increasing demand for services for mobile customers has resulted in the need to develop service clients that could also be used from mobile devices and not only from PCs, which to date were the developers' main focus. In this paper we propose a model–driven development for these clients, whose platform-specific level attends to the specific requirements depending on the final device where the said client is to be installed. Furthermore, we propose the use of aspect-oriented techniques for the final implementation with the aim of facilitating the client's adaptation as a result of the particular device model characteristics and end user preferences.

Process Algebra Description Language, PADL in short, is a description language for describing structural components specified as individual process working in parallel with communication capabilities. This description is close to what we consider a web service except for the communication process. The PADL language is consider for synchronous communication while we need an asynchronous definition in communications terms. Then we propose in this work an extension of PADL for specifying Web Services Architectures.

The exigencies and the particular characteristics of website development are a great challenge for designers and developers. There are many differences between typical software application development and website development. In website development, the presentation component; visual and graphical, plays an important role, which is not that important for not web applications. This component can be documented by using patterns, and particularly usability patterns. Traditionally, guidelines have been used to deal with it. These patterns should be written so that they can be used by users, designers and developers. Thus, users will be able to make proposals, user interface designers will be able to imagine and developers will be able to build the application.

The users became more and more mobile. By mobility, we mean free communication through various and different devices. This new way of communication generates a new fashion of learning. We add the notion of on any devices to the traditional concept of E-learning which is being free to learn any time and on any device. To carry out courses in E-Learning environment, we use LMS (Learning management Systems). LMS are now numbrous and more and more available. Our research team develops a new LMS based on the Use of Web Services entitled SOLEIL. This paper deals with the adaptation of educational Web Services to mobile devices.

Nowadays, the satisfaction of the users' requirements of a composition process execution in a grid environment remains a difficult task to be accomplished. It is done by brokers or using simple mechanisms of matchmaking. There users must express their needs in the grid language and then the grid determines the way to execute. In this article we propose a genetic sequencing approach for the research of the best way to execute a composition of services in a grid environment satisfying the user's need. This paper presents the genetic sequencing approach and then presents how to adapt this approach for the determination of the best time to execute the service composition.

The pervasiveness of computational systems capable of accomplishing electronic commerce over the Internet is rapidly increasing with devices routinely embedded in many everyday household objects. This in itself causes very complex network dynamics. When these devices or associated agents, programme code etc. are liberated from a set geographical location, through laptop computers and mobile phones for example, the control of such systems more than outstrips the capability of any human or currently conceived artificial system to provide all but the simplest features of self-governance as exemplified by autonomic management. This work addresses the need for autonomic type self-governance for these systems by seeking a scalable specification of autonomic systems/networks that is applicable to m-commerce scenarios. This involves the initial realization that the representation is best accomplished through cognitive systems portrayed in mathematical logic with the power to detect and characterize system properties at run time. The system hierarchy can then be viewed through ambient representation for appropriate monitoring leading to sensing and observation overlays that can achieve grounded definitions of system signals for run time self-governance and autonomic response.

Transaction processing is of growing importance for mobile computing. Booking tickets, flight reservation, banking, ePayment, and booking holiday arrangements are just a few examples for mobile transactions. Due to temporarily disconnected situations the synchronisation and consistent transaction processing are key issues. Serializability is a too strong criteria for correctness when the semantics of a transaction is known. We introduce a transaction model that allows higher concurrency for a certain class of transactions defined by its semantic. The transaction results are “escrow serializable” and the synchronisation mechanism is non-blocking. Experimental implementation showed higher concurrency, transaction throughput, and less resources used than common locking or optimistic protocols.

Recently there has been a flurry of research inspired by social and biological models for achieving software autonomy. This has been prompted by the need to automate laborious administration tasks, recover from unanticipated systems failure, and provide self-protection from security vulnerabilities, whilst guaranteeing predictable autonomic software behaviour. However, runtime assured adaptation of software to new requirement in a mobile setting, where there is code mobility in the form of mobile agents as well as the presence of mobile devices, is still a major outstanding issue for research. This paper presents a language support for the programming of autonomic software in mobile environments and m-commerce environments in particular. The paper starts by a review of the state-of-the-art into runtime software adaptation and mobility. This is followed by a developed Neptune framework and language support applied to mobile ambients, which is here described via an illustrative example based on a commercial decision support system that automatically updates according to a newly developed run time code editor. The paper ends with a discussion and some concluding remarks leading to suggested further works.