Introduction: Advances in E-business engineering

This special issue of Information Technology and Management presents expanded versions of 20 papers from the above-mentioned conferences held recently, authored by scholars from Austria, China, Japan, Russia, UK, and US.

Abstract

E-business is more than just e-commerce.It is one of the most challenging areas for industry and research communities.E-business has evolved from business-to-business, business-to-customer, customer-to-business, customer-tocustomer, and business-to-government systems to the integrated and collaborative business services among various information systems and e-marketplaces.In this evolving process, integrated e-business systems and their related supporting platforms have to be rapidly designed and developed in order to meet different requirements.A variety of e-business engineering paradigms and technologies have been developed to tackle these challenges.There are many research issues needed to be addressed.These issues include heterogeneous services integration, disparate e-business functions collaboration, semantic level e-business messaging, etc.Today, not only large companies, but also medium or small-sized companies are learning that e-business is a required component of doing business.As a result, there is a growing demand for insights into challenges, issues, and solutions related to the design, implementation, and management of e-business systems.To respond to the market needs from both academic researchers and practitioners, and to communicate research results on e-business engineering, a number of related conferences organized by the IFIP TC8 WG8.9, IEEE