Candidacy Report

CURTIN
University of Technology
Department School of Computing

Masters by Research in Computer Science

Project Supervisor: Andrew Marriott (raytrace@cs.curtin.edu.au)
Project Supervisor: Tim McGrath (tmcgrath@portcomm.com.au)

Project Student: Sacha Schlegel ¹
Student ID: 12253634
E-Mail: sacha@schlegel.li

Document

Electronic business in the 20th century is a paradigm to utilise computer systems in order to make business easier, faster, better, and to lower costs. Electronic business is common business embedded in an electronic infrastructure (e.g. software systems, networks, security, communication, and messaging). With electronic business becoming more and more important, different world wide efforts are underway to define standards which help to achieve interoperability. Electronic Business XML (ebXML)² is such an open specification (not standard yet) which uses another well known open standard called Extensible Markup Language (XML)³.

The purpose of this research is to find an algorithm to form an ebXML Collaboration Protocol Agreement (CPA) from two ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profiles (CPP) at three levels. First level is an algorithmic process which parses two CPPs and creates a draft CPA. Different information elements in both CPP are related so the algorithm has to find matching elements. The second level is an automated negotiation system which negotiates over negotiatable elements of a CPA. The third level is a basic human based web-enabled negotiation system to finalise the CPA. Algorithms and negotiations are used in this research.

The objective is to provide free tools which allow the creation of a valid CPA from two CPP's. These are algorithms and a negotiation system for an automated negotiation.

The research methodology is more quantitative than qualitative and also of type ``design and demonstration''. An evaluation of the tools will be done by an expert.

The results will go into the summary in the masters thesis and the source code will be contributed to an open source ebXML project. The intelectual property (IP) will be held by the researcher. There does not exist a free ebXML CPA formation tool and this research can provide a CPA formation prototype. The results of this research can be used in further research in real world CPA formation.

Candidacy Report

Abstract:

Footnotes