Coordinating Electronic Commerce Activities in MANIFOLD

Modern Electronic Commerce environments are heavily web-based and involve issues such as distributed execution, multiuser interactive access or interface with and use of middleware platforms. Thus, their components exhibit the properties of communication, cooperation and coordination as in CSCW, groupware or workflow management systems. In this paper we examine the potential of using coordination technology to model Electronic Commerce activities and we show the benefits of such an approach. Furthermore, we argue that controloriented, event-driven coordination models (which enjoy some inherent properties such as security) are more suitable for Electronic Commerce than data-driven ones which are based on accessing an open shared communication medium in almost unrestricted ways.