An Open Personalised Electronic Information Commerce System

Project Information

OPELIX

Grant agreement ID: IST-1999-10288

Project closed

Start date 1 January 2000

End date 31 May 2002

Funded under

• Programme for research, technological development and demonstration on a "User-friendly information society, 1998-2002"

Total cost € 2 996 005,00

EU contribution € 1 600 000,00

Coordinated by

ATOS ORIGIN SA
Spain

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Deliverables

Domain model of information commerce over the Internet

The expansion of the Internet and its use in business and commerce has created a number of new business opportunities and a need for their supporting models. One of these opportunities may be classified as information commerce (i-commerce), a special case of e-commerce focused on the purchase and sale of information as a commodity. I-commerce may also be viewed as a special case of trading of intangible goods. This result entails a business and domain model for the emerging field of i-commerce, presented as a paper on a conference. The model, called CIP, describes an information marketplace, a virtual environment in which buyers and sellers of information may trade information products. The purpose of the model is to clarify the issues involved in i-commerce, identify architectural requirements of i-commerce systems, and identify new services needed to support such architectures on the Internet. Such models are necessary for understanding and classifying the rapidly increasing information and service providers on the Internet. Indeed, the CIP model may be used to describe the functions and services of many existing and emerging Web-based services.

OPELIX toolset

The exploitation of the Opelix toolset will enable enterprises to produce, sell, deliver, and manage highly personalised contents and services over the Internet. OPELIX will provide an open information commerce platform consisting of tools to support the following tasks: - Describe information offers and information requests. - Deliver information on time and in an individualised manner, to precisely match the information demands of users. - Manage flexible and secure payments. OPELIX will support different payment models such as detail-based, pay-per-view, volume-based, quality-dependent, time-based, and flat subscription fees, or a combination of these. - Provide means for authentication, non-repudiation, and dealing with copyright issues. With the help of OPELIX, companies interested in selling information products can define offers for their products. Then they can use OPELIX's matching mechanisms to find appropriate customers in their customer database, negotiate with them and settle a contract. Additionally offers can be announced to the public to allow interested consumers to find matching products by themselves via customer-defined matching and searching agents. Mobile agents would interpret customer queries, and look for companies that offer the requested information. Optionally, these agents could negotiate with the agents representing the information vendor, to settle a contract. Delivery of information products is supported via email, download and the OPELIX push system. Delivered information can be authenticated. The OPELIX toolset is available as open source.

Business offer language

The Business Offer Language provides means for the introduction of business models at an information product level, i.e. it allows to define efficiently which information services are offered by the business (business offers), and requested by the users, respectively. A business offer describes the type of information sold by a business, under what conditions, which quality guarantees and which subscription facility is available. The interpretation of the business offer language results in the execution of a delivery and payment protocol between information supplier and user. Thereby, the main focus is on the business related and quality aspects rather than the content descriptions. Different types of infrastructures for content description, delivery, payment and security are supported. The model enables the provider to provide a variety of different payment models, including the well-known ones like detail-based, pay-per-view, volume-based, quality-dependent, time-based, and flat subscription fees, or a combination of these. The business offer language is based on the information representation standard XML. The Business Offer Language is one of the main innovative results of OPELIX.