Scope

The new technologies that the Internet enables and its global deployment have made it the natural medium for electronic business and commerce. The focus of electronic business has moved from 
Business-to-Customer (B2C) to Business-to-Business (B2B) electronic marketplaces. The existing B2C e-commerce portals serve as a query service that present a combined hypertext catalog of goods from different companies. They lack flexibility and their functionality is quite poor as it is targeted to simple services such as the cataloguing and sales of books or CDs. The B2B marketplaces require a new infrastructure to manage more complex business processes and transacations. The marketplaces must be flexible enough to non-intrusively let players join and leave at their convenience; they must support the whole supply chain, facilitate negotiation and information exchange between the players; they must give the necessary security and privacy guarantees. Therefore one of the main challenges for the designers of the modern business to business electronic commerce infrastructures is to move the communication among business partners from the proprietary and inflexible Electronic Data Interchange solutions to effective and flexible Electronic Business Hubs. 

In this second workshop on Electronic Business Hubs we propose to focus on the role and potential of XML-based data representation and manipulation, the techniques for semantic enrichment of the business concepts, web-based business process representation techniques, and modern security and privacy techniques applied in the new infrastructure of the Electronic Business Hubs. 

The aim of the workshop is to gauge the state of the art in this domain, the future needs of the industries and techniques from the research side, to clarify the directions of future research. 

Topics

We are calling for papers reporting original research results, industrial experience, or case studies. The topics of interest pertaining particularly to electronic business include, but are not limited to:

• XML-based data models for product description(XML, XML schema, XML clones)
• Business ontologies 
• Web-based models for business knowledge representation (RDF, semantic markup)
• Methodology and tools for designing DTDs and XML schemas
• Information integration techniques and aggregators
• Tools and techniques for business and marketing intelligence on the Web
• Convergence of XML and Database technology (queries, views, updates, data warehouses, etc.)
• Convergence of XML and Decision support (visualization, expert systems and business rules, etc.)
• Security and privacy with XML
• B2B applications

Authors should submit an electronic copy of their paper before March 8, 2002 to Yang Liang-Huai at