ECommerce.1 14.2 KB
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  <TITLE>W3C Micropayments Interest Group</TITLE>
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<P>
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<H1>
  Electronic Commerce Interest Group&nbsp;
</H1>
<CENTER>
  <A HREF="Micropayments/">Micropayments</A> -
  <A HREF="/ECommerce/Activity.html">Activity statements</A>
  <P>
  <A HREF="/ECommerce/Activity.html"></A>&nbsp;<A HREF="/Policy/" target="">Public
  Policy Interest Group</A> &nbsp;-
  &nbsp;<A HREF="/Security/" target="">Security Interest Group</A>.
</CENTER>
<P>
  <HR>
<H2>
  The W3C Ecommerce/Micropayment Activity is now closed.
</H2>
<P>
An major factor in the evolution of the Web is Electronic Commerce: the ability
to buy, sell, and advertise goods and services to customers and consumers.
One concern in the development of Electronic Commerce on the Web is the trust
that can be placed in the provenance, reliability, security and privacy of
information available from or transferred over the internet. Another concern
is the need for low friction commerce transactions allowing quality and ease
of use for consumers, a key factor the future of Electronic Commerce. The
potential for global electronic commerce is immense; much of this potential
is and will be realized by the continued development of Web technologies.
The World Wide Web Consortium, leading the web to its full potential, is
therefore concerned with the evolution of Electronic Commerce on the Web.
The role of W3C is to focus on core infrastructure technologies for Electronic
Commerce and identify common infrastructure needed in this area. W3C is not
committed for example in specifying banking systems nor schemas for specific
Electronic Commerce applications. 
<P>
W3C has closed its Ecommerce and Micropayment Activity, but through the following
activities W3C is committed to key factors for success in the evolution of
Electronic Commerce:<BR>
<UL>
  <LI>
    The W3C <A href="http://www.w3.org/DSig">XML Signature</A> provides a mechanism
    for signing documents and metadata in order to establish who made the statement.
  <LI>
    The W3C <A HREF="http://www.w3.org/Encryption/2001/">XML Encryption</A> specifies
    a process for encrypting/decrypting digital content and an XML syntax used
    to represent the encrypted content and information that enables an intended
    recipient to decrypt it.
  <LI>
    The W3C <A HREF="http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/">XML Protoco</A>l goal is to
    develop technologies which allow two or more peers to communicate in a
    distributed environment, using XML as its encapsulation language, allowing
    automated negotiations. The search is on for common ground that can meet
    the heavyweight, commercial demands of business to business e-commerce systems,
    and at the same time satisfy aesthetic requirements for a lightweight, simple
    network protocol for distributed applications.
  <LI>
    The <A HREF="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/">Semantic Web </A>is a vision: the
    idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be
    used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration
    and reuse of data across various applications.
    <A HREF="http://www.w3.org/Metadata/">Metadata</A> provides a means to make
    statements and create machine-readable statements. 
  <LI>
    The <A href="http://www.w3.org/P3P">Platform for Privacy Preferences
    Project</A> (P3P) provides communication about data privacy practices between
    consumers and merchant sites on the Web as well as enhanced user control
    over the use and disclosure of personal information.
  <LI>
    The <A href="http://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/">Micropayment
    initiative</A> specifies how to provide in a Web page all the information
    necessary to initialize a micropayment and transfer this information to the
    wallet for processing.
  <LI>
    Major W3C common specifications for the Web in areas such as
    <A HREF="http://www.w3.org/Protocols/">network protocols</A>,
    <A href="http://www.w3.org/UI/">graphical user interface</A>, remain the
    basis of Electronic Commerce.
</UL>
<P>
  <HR>
<H3>
  News
</H3>
<UL>
  <LI>
    <SPAN class="gras"> <IMG ALT="New!" HEIGHT=13 WIDTH=32 SRC="new_red">
    </SPAN><A HREF="http://www.w3.org/TR/EC-related-activities">W3C and Electronic
    Commerce</A>, &nbsp;a W3C Note &nbsp;about&nbsp; the current W3C activities
    related to Electronic Commerce for the purpose of assessing the Consortium's
    future role in ecommerce-related work.
  <LI>
    <SPAN class="gras"><IMG ALT="New!" HEIGHT=13 WIDTH=32 SRC="new_red">
    <A HREF="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-Micropayment-Markup/">Common Markup for
    Micropayment per-fee-links</A>"&nbsp;Final Public Working Draft released
    for public and <A HREF="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/#RecsWD">Last
    Call</A> review.</SPAN><BR>
    The W3C Membership and other interested parties are invited to review this
    1999 August 25th Final Public Working Draft and report implementation experience.
    Please send comments to the publicly archived
    list&nbsp;<A HREF="mailto:www-micropay-comments@w3.org">www-micropay-comments@w3.org</A>
    (<A HREF="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-micropay-comments/">archive</A>).
  <LI>
    <A HREF="http://www.hrl.il.ibm.com/mpay">IBM Micro Payments &nbsp;V 1.3
    </A>implements the W3C
    "<A HREF="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-Micropayment-Markup/">Common Markup for
    Micropayment per-fee-links</A>"&nbsp;Public Working Draft .<BR>
      <HR WIDTH="100" SIZE="1">
</UL>
<UL>
  <LI>
    <A HREF="/ECommerce/Micropayments/Group/MarkupWG.html">Micropayments Markup
    Working Group Page</A> and
    <A HREF="/ECommerce/Micropayments/Group/APIWG.html">Micropayments API Working
    Group Page</A> (W3C Members only)
  <LI>
    <A HREF="/ECommerce/Micropayments/Group/BriefingPackage.html">Briefing Package
    "Micropayment Initiation"</A> ( W3C Members only) /
    <A HREF="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ac-members/1998AprJun/0026">Briefing
    Package accepted</A> (W3C Members only)
  <LI>
    <A HREF="Overview-xmledifact">Electronic Commerce Interest Group provides
    infrastructure assistance to XML/EDI</A>
  <LI>
    <A HREF="Micropayments/micropay-announce.html">Meeting on Micropayment in
    Paris - Announcement</A> /
    &nbsp;&nbsp;<A HREF="Micropayments/Group/micropay-minutes.htm">Meeting Minutes
    </A>(W3C Members only)
  <LI>
    <A HREF="980108-Seattle/" target="">Interest Group Meeting in Seattle&nbsp;
    - Agenda</A> / &nbsp;<A HREF="980108-Seattle/Group/Minutes.html">Meeting
    Minutes</A> (W3C Members only)
  <LI>
    <A HREF="970903-Brussels/" target="">Interest Group Meeting in Brussels -
    Agenda</A> / <A HREF="970903-Brussels/Group/Minutes.html" target="">Meeting
    Minutes</A> (W3C Members only)
</UL>
<P>
  <HR WIDTH="100" SIZE="1">
<H2>
  What it is about
</H2>
<P>
An important factor in the growth of the Web is <I>electronic commerce</I>:
the ability to buy, sell, and advertise goods and services to customers and
consumers. The Web is a new communications medium and, like all new media,
requires us to rethink the existing solutions to age-old problems. The World
Wide Web Consortium is concerned with the evolution of the medium itself.
We must both understand the problems and work with our members to contribute
to the solutions. The <B>Electronic Commerce Interest Group</B> is a forum
designed to allow the members to share information with the Consortium staff
and other members about:
<UL COMPACT>
  <LI>
    Problems they have encountered (and proposed solutions)
  <LI>
    Priorities (in addressing the problems)
  <LI>
    Work underway in related areas
  <LI>
    What role, if any, the Consortium should play
</UL>
<P>
The Interest Group meets three times a year for two years, with meetings
spread across North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific. There is an on-going
<A HREF="#Join Mailing List">email list</A> associated with the Interest
Group. There is no required resource commitment beyond attendance at any
or all of the meetings, although registration is required for each meeting.
<P>
The Interest Group has no decision-making authority and is strictly advisory
to the W3C staff. Nonetheless, we expect it to be the forum from which we
will draw participants in the design of briefing packages for work related
to Electronic Commerce. It will also serve to help refine the requirement
of any technical work in this area to be undertaken by W3C.&nbsp;
<H2>
  Micropayment initiative
</H2>
<P>
The <A HREF="/ECommerce/Activity.html">Electronic Commerce Activity </A>is
currently involved in realizing the opportunities in
<A HREF="/ECommerce/Micropayments/Overview.html">Micropayments</A>, and this
will form the main thrust of the Activity during the next 6 months.
<A HREF="/ECommerce/Micropayments/Overview.html">Micropayments</A> are very
small payments made over the Web for pages that you access. Micropayments
cover transactions which are too small to be economical as credit card
transactions, and can be as little as a fraction of a cent. Micropayments
provide an alternative to subscription and advertising as a source of revenue.
<H2>
  Other Resources
</H2>
<H3>
  <A name="Acknowledged Submissions">Acknowledged Submissions</A> to W3C related
  to Electronic Commerce
</H3>
<UL>
  <LI>
    <A href="http://www.w3.org/Submission/1998/18/">ICE</A> - The Information
    and Content Exchange Protocol proposes a protocol and data format to implement
    the shared business rules in the domain of syndicated content, on top of
    the Web infrastructure of XML, HTTP, and URIs.
  <LI>
    <A href="http://www.w3.org/Submission/1998/09/">SDML</A>- The Signed Document
    Markup Language describes how to structure a complete signed document, with
    the material being signed as part of the document. We expect that a web-based
    document signature scheme would have to address external documents, also
    referenced by URI. SMDL was an important initial contribution to the
    <A href="http://www.w3.org/Signature">XML Signature</A> Working Group.
  <LI>
    <A href="http://www.w3.org/Submission/1999/02/">UCLP</A> - The Universal
    Commerce Language and Protocol is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) application
    for metadata related to commercial products and companies and that can be
    used in identifying and retrieving product data residing across the Internet.
  <LI>
    <A HREF="http://www.w3.org/Submission/1999/11/">Using P3P for E-Commerce</A>
    describes how to use P3P's extensible data schema mechanism to define data
    schemas appropriate for e-commerce applications.
  <LI>
    <A HREF="http://www.w3.org/Submission/1999/05/">XFA</A> - &nbsp;XML Forms
    Architecture describes an XML tagset for electronic forms with support for
    graphics, templates, calculations, validation, scripting, picture clauses,
    sequencing, and digital signatures.
  <LI>
    <A href="http://www.w3.org/Submission/1998/16/">XFDL</A> - The Extensible
    Forms Description Language describes an XML syntax to represent complex forms
    such as those found in business and government.
</UL>
<P>
Surely you are aware that this is only a starting point. <BR>
You can read more about this in the <A HREF="/ECommerce/Activity.html">Activity
statements</A>.<BR>
Please visit also our <A HREF="/Policy/" target="">Public Policy Interest
Group</A> and the <A HREF="/Security/" target="">Security Interest Group</A>.
<BR>
W3C members are invited to read the
<A HREF="/Member/9703/ecommerceig.htm" target="">Electronic Commerce Interest
Group Briefing Package</A>. <BR>
W3C members are also invited to join the mailing list for the Electronic
Commerce Interest Group. To do so, please send mail to
<A HREF="mailto:w3c-ecommerce-ig-request@w3.org">w3c-ecommerce-ig-request@w3.org</A>.
The mailing list is archived, but the
<A HREF="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ecommerce-ig/" target="">archive</A>
is accessible only for W3C members.
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<ADDRESS>
  <A HREF = "mailto:tmichel@w3.org">Thierry MICHEL</A>, W3C Electronic Commerce
  Activity Leader<BR>
  Last updated: $Date: 2001/06/20 08:57:26 $
</ADDRESS>
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