The Virtues Architecture: A Software Infrastructure for Business-to-Business E-Commerce

Most discussion on the current hot topic of e-commerce focuses either on the relationship between the customer and the supplier or on the security of these interactions. In this paper we present an architecture for building business-to-business e-commerce applications. The primary objective is to develop a lightweight infrastructure for building and maintaining collaborations from partners distributed across the Internet. Within this infrastructure, techniques have been developed to aid in the location and composition of services, manage the distributed workflow process and aid in maintaining contractual obligations.