Modelling the ICE Standard with a Formal Language for Information Commerce

Abstract

Automatizing information commerce requires languages to represent the typical information commerce processes. Existing languages and standards cover either only very specific types of business models or are too general to capture in a concise way the specific properties of information commerce processes. We introduce a language that is specifically designed for information commerce. It can be directly used for the implementation of the processes and communication required in information commerce. We demonstrate the use of the language by applying it to an important standard for specifying information commerce processes, the ICE Information and Content Exchange protocol [ICE1]. By doing so we also illustrate the benefit of using formal specifications for information commerce processes allowing to capture informal specifications, like ICE, in a concise way.

This work has been partially supported by the European Comission under contract IST-1999-10288 (OPELIX) as part of the Information Technology Society program.