Ontological modelling of e‐services to ensure appropriate mobile transactions

The main goal of this paper is to provide simple ontological support to mobile electronic commerce. The description of an ontology‐driven Transaction Monitor (TM) for mobile business applications is considered. The approach is based on the assumption that the transaction management tool can be implemented in a mobile terminal, allowing integration of different distributed external e‐services. We use the ontology‐based framework for transaction management so that the TM will be able to manage transaction across multiple e‐services and we consider management of distributed location‐based services as an example of such ontology‐based TM implementation. The core of the approach is very simple service ontologies. Ontologies should be ‘placed’ both in mobile terminals and in e‐services. They define common multiple clients—multiple services standards and vocabularies for the use of the names, types, schemas, default values for parameters, atomic service actions with appropriate structure of action's input and output. In our implementation ontologies help to the TM to deal with multiple services during transactions and to simplify the appropriate user interface. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.