Event-oriented Web-based E-trading

We address the problem of defining policies that may be used in the evaluation of requests made by client actors, in the course of web-based e-trading, to perform actions on the resources maintained by the server agents of an e-cooperative. An e-cooperative is a group of agents in cyberspace that may act individually or in conjunction with other agents to satisfy a client's request to act. Our principal contribution to this key problem is to define formally an event-oriented model in terms of which policies may be specified for helping to ensure that only legitimate forms of client actions are performed in the course of engaging in e-trading via the web. We call this model the Event-oriented Web-based E-trading (EWE) model. Policies defined in terms of the EWE model are used to specify a set of actions that client actors can perform as a consequence of the client having a particular status. We define the EWE model using a logic programming language and we give examples of web-based e-trading policy representation, validation and evaluation.