Common Open Service Market for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

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COSMOS Project objectives

The COSMOS project aims to develop a support platform for business transactions across the Internet based on a generic contracting service. Potential users of such a system include small and medium enterprises and even individual persons. The contracting service enables its users to negotiate, sign, and settle electronic contracts across the Internet without leaving a uniform and flexible system environment.

Existing E-Commerce software solutions still involve serious shortcomings in this area:
they usually do not cover all phases of commercial transactions at tolerable costs and in a generic way. As the next step, the COSMOS project focuses on specific systems support for executing business transactions in electronic market environments. As a result, various distinct technologies are used for separate Electronic Commerce mechanisms today - all of which lacking an integrated platform that provides both a smooth interworking of these building blocks and the dynamic extensibility of the overall architecture.

Approach

Starting with real business cases, e.g. from the music publishing field, the COSMOS project combines background expertise from various aspects of electronic commerce with state-of-the-art Internet technologies. The outcome of the project will be a suite of software components that is to be commercialized and offered to potential service providers in the field of Electronic Commerce (e.g. banks, telecom operators or IT service providers).

The integration of software technologies such as collaboration support systems, workflow management systems, and communication infrastructures such as CORBA, enables COSMOS partners to roll-out innovative Electronic Commerce products in time.

The technologies used in order to implement the COSMOS architecture (e.g. CORBA/Java, Workflow Management Systems, telecollaboration tools) will be evaluated against alternative approaches. System software standards will be incorporated where reasonable and initiated where required. This mainly applies to the standardization of CORBA facilities and Java-based components. However, in the context of open markets, participants who provide application-level services, should have the chance to provide non-standard mechanisms such as innovative negotiation protocols, contract templates or application services.

Results & Commercialisation

Industrial demand has already been identified for electronic contracting in two domains:

• Provision of the service through a third party (e.g. a bank or a telecom service provider). In this case the service is charged on a subscriber or per-use basis. Contacts have already been established with a German telecom service provider in order to investigate further applications of a contracting service.
  
• In-house usage of the service in large organizations to manage external business relationships (contracts and projects). Here, business processes span organizational boundaries and therefore the workflow integration achieved through the contracting service will help to flexibly set-up an individual, project-based control service.

Another business sector where industrial demand has been identified is the wholesale sector: here, the distributor acts as a virtual enterprise that markets proprietary, branded products which are anufactured or produced by a changing set of suppliers.
The task of the wholesaler is to maintain product quality and the overall volume for the distribution chain. The change of business relationships between the wholesaler and its suppliers or subcontractors requires a flexible representation of business entities, their contractual bindings, and the inter-organizational integration of business processes.

Pilot users of the trial software

The following users from the COSMOS project are involved in the user role:

• Interzone Music Publishing, London will contribute a requirement analysis in order to provide the appropriate application scenario for the architecture and development partners. At the end of the project, IMP will evaluate the level of achievements against the initially specified application scenario.
• SIA, Milano will provide the testing platform and input from the provider's point of view. Experiences from this perspective will complete IMP's evaluation.

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