FMEC: Formal Modeling for Electronic Commerce

The news is good, despite the collapses in the telecom and dotcom markets and industries. Electronic commerce is here to stay. Real, if incremental, progress is being made in achieving productivity gains through continuing automation in support of commerce. Standards-making is moving forward. Knowledge and know-how are accumulating, the realm of the automated is expanding, and the study of electronic commerce is vibrant, sophisticated, and mature. The research collected in this special issue represents the latest work in a stream, now a tradition, of work on electronic commerce that began more than 15 years ago, in the mid-1980s. Then, a small international and interdisciplinary collection of scholars, many of them focused on applications of formal logic, began to meet annually and to discuss issuing pertaining to the formalization, and structuring, of heretofore informal notions of import to commerce. The FMEC group has grown over time and continues to attract researchers from many different disciplines, including commerce, computer science, and philosophy. The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) served as the venue for more than 10 years. Subsequently, the FMEC group, as it has come to be called, has met annually at universities in Europe and the United States. The eight papers appearing in this special issue originated at the 2000 FMEC workshop, held in Philadelphia at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. The eight papers may conveniently, if roughly, be grouped into three categories, representing the three areas of greatest activity in the group. The first category is conceptual analysis. There are two papers here in this category and both address the analysis of the concept of trust in the context of electronic commerce. The first paper in the special issue is ‘‘On the Concept of Trust,’’ by Andrew J.I. Jones, a philosopher and logician at the Department of Computer Science, King’s College, London. The subject of trust has become a minor industry in e-commerce research. Professor Jones brings the experience and tools of a professional philosopher to the task of clarifying the concept of trust. Although the paper is tightly written, it is fully accessible to the non-technical reader. The analysis offered in this paper both novel, as seen by comparison with other theories reviewed, and conservative, in that it preserves and explains trust situations everyone recognizes. The second paper in the special issue is by Yao-hua Tan of the Department of Economics and Business Administration in the Free University Amsterdam and by Walter Thoen of the Erasmus University Research Institute for Decision and Information Systems (EURIDIS) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The paper is entitled ‘‘Formal Aspects of a Generic Model of Trust for Electronic Commerce.’’ It offers analysis and formal modeling of trust that complement interestingly the paper by Andrew Jones. Tan and Thoen present a thorough taxonomy of trust situations and conditions. They then offer a framework in logic for representing trust situations and for deductively inferring consequences. The logic model presented is an approximation. Refinements will no doubt ensue, but insights are available now. The second category of papers is automation in support of electronic commerce. Four papers, papers 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the issue, fall into this category. Paper 3 is ‘‘Cross-Organizational Workflow Integration Using Contracts,’’ by Hans Weigand and Willem-Jan van den Heuvel of the INFOLAB at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. A longstanding, and very productive, area of research within the FMEC group has been the prospects for a general-purpose formal language for business communication (FLBC). Recognition of the importance of speech acts in business communication, and hence as a requirement for FLBC,