Special Section Editorial Preface

This special section of the International Journal of E-Business Research contains a selection of the best papers published in the E-Commerce Technologies track (ECT) of the 20th Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2005) held in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 17, 2005. The ECT track has been held as part of SAC since 2003. The last years have seen an exponential growth and dramatic changes in the field of ecommerce technologies. The focus of the ECT track is on novel applications for e-commerce, that is, applications that hold new promises for rapidly evolving electronic markets. Some years ago, e-commerce applications primarily dealt with handling transactions and managing catalogs. Business requirements, however, are evolving beyond transaction support to include content management, mobile and pervasive computing, privacy and personalization, interoperability, and integration. In this line, the ECT track focuses on technologies to create offerings, the latest developments in electronic marketplaces, computational and deployment issues, architectural support, policies, and advanced solutions and practices. The ECT track also aims at bringing together academic and industrial researchers from various fields to discuss the current challenges to e-commerce. In 2005, the ECT track attracted 20 highquality submissions from 11 different countries. The program committee, comprised of experts from several disciplines, selected eight papers after a rigorous review process in which at least three reviewers reviewed every paper. To ensure the highest quality of accepted papers, the review process was double-blind, that is, neither the authors knew the name of the reviewers nor did the reviewers know the authors of the papers that they were reviewing. At the end, these selected papers present a well-balanced view of e-commerce technologies combining both theoretical issues and system development. Out of the eight accepted papers, the authors of three papers were selected to submit a revised and extended version of their papers to this special section of IJEBR. In addition to being the papers with the highest marks, these papers represent very different domains inside the broad field of e-commerce technologies. Thus, this special section gives a good selection of the current lines of research in the field. The papers contained in this volume are: