Processes in electronic commerce

Trading communities, virtual business processes and virtual enterprises are key elements in today's electronic commerce. We argue that supporting these notions is similar to supporting the development of coarse grained distributed programs and that these programs can be abstracted as processes. Following this idea, we have developed a language for the enactment of processes that incorporates several important features like exception handling, event management and transactional guarantees. We describe these features and discuss the use of processes in E-Comm.