1. Introduction
E-Commerce applications operate in a distributed environment involving multiple parties with dynamic availability, and a large number of heterogeneous information sources with evolving contents. A business partnership is often created dynamically and maintained only for the required duration such as a single transaction. E-commerce activities typically rely on business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) interoperation at the business process level. The automation of these activities represents both challenges and opportunities for supporting inter-enterprise business process management.