Agent-Based Privilege Negotiation for E-commerce on World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (Web) is an important channel for business-to-customer transactions in E-commerce. Most commercial organisations have the basic goal to outreach as many potential customers as possible and establish business relationships with them. Before granting privileges to access some protected resources, organisational systems must facilitate the ability to assess the trustworthiness of entities (users or applications) they encounter. For E-commerce on the Web, a typical service provider faces a wide spectrum of potential users without any pre-existing relationship. The question of interest is how these processes of trust establishment and authorisation can be conducted effectively and efficiently.