Internet and E Business 23
Internet and E Business 23
Internet and E Business 23
Seung C. Lee
Jinsoo Park
School of Business
Korea University
1, 5-ka, Anam-dong Sungbuk-ku
Seoul 136-701, South Korea
jinsoo.park@acm.org
Abstract
Specifying interface for e-business application is
becoming complex because of its demanding
functionality, a rapid advance in Web technology, and an
increasing need of integration with legacy applications.
All the recent developments call for a more methodical
approach to e-business application interface. In this paper,
we propose an interface specification method founded on
the concepts of meta-information structure and
information structure, as well as taking account of
various page, link, and component types. They are
rigorously utilized in the activities of the metainformation structure analysis and information structure
analysis to arrive at a well-formed interface specification
for e-business application.
Keywords: e-business application, meta-information,
interface, systems development methodology
1. Introduction
Specifying the interface for Web applications are more
complex than ever due to the three key developments in
their design. First, these applications are now required to
perform more and more functions than before because the
Web as a business computing platform is gaining ground
as companies race to transform their businesses into ebusinesses [10]. A business function on the Web can be
implemented by either writing code in a page or calling
an existing software component. This implies that we
should define what, where, and how functions should be
performed. The answers to the question can be found by
considering: (1) the information that must be delivered to
the user regardless of the underlying functions; (2) the
delivery process of the information that often involves
many pages intertwined with each other; and (3) the
enabling technology and available software components
to implement a certain function.
Second, Web technology is rapidly advancing to meet
the computing need that demands more interactive and
dynamic delivery of information [2]. Although some
Web pages are still static in nature, many of them are
generated on the fly in response to a certain event. This
means that a Web page can take shape of one or more of
2. Related Work
The explosive popularity of the Web has created a new
interest in Web-based applications, including intranet,
extranet, and various applications such as e-business and eengineering. One of the problems, however, in developing
an e-business application is an insufficiency of design
methodologies [3, 4], not in terms of numbers but in terms
of the richness that covers an important aspect of an e-
3. Underlying Concepts
In order to understand the interface specification
described in the paper, it is first necessary to understand the
underlying concepts. Accordingly, in this section, we
provide a detailed description for them. The first part of
this section explains page types which are fundamental
units of Web applications, followed by details of software
component types. The third part explains link semantics
from which the six link types are derived.
Main
s c ope
P roduc t
C a ta log
Us e r G uide
HW guide
O rder
O S guide
S W guide
S e rv ic e re que s t
P roduc t C atalog
C ommon
s c ope
Us e r G uide
C onfiguration
problem
O rde r
A ggre ga te
s c ope for
OS guide
OS1
OS2
OS3
Ins ta lling
Ne twork
s e rv ic e
Trouble s hootin
g
Network
problem
Miscellaneous
problem
Figure 4.
Analysis
Although we do not need layers other than leaf metainformation and visible layers, in Figure 5 we show all
the layers with appropriate page types, link types, and
component types to provide an overall context for the leaf
meta-information elements and visible layers. The left
side of Figure 5 depicts a factual/definitional metainformation element.
Figure 5.
Outputs of the Information Structure
Analysis on Two Meta-Information Elements
We assume it does not require a data storage layer but uses
a style sheet file (i.e., network.css) and a client-side
component (i.e., media player). They are all invisible pages
but require links to host pages. The right side of Figure 5
is more complex than the left side because it shows the
output of an information structure analysis on a
process/procedural meta-information element (i.e., Service
request). We assume that, when a user submits a service
6. Concluding Remarks
Currently, many advanced technologies (e.g., scripting,
software components, general programming languages, and
constantly evolving markup languages) are incorporated
into the e-business application and other types of Webbased applications.
To incorporate such rapid
technological advances in the area of Web-based
References
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