Currently three research projects are under consideration by the research staff of the Institute for Global Electronic Commerce:

Intelligent Lawyer Online System
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The Electronic Channel Broker
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Trading Regulations Infrastructure for Small and
Medium Enterprises

Intelligent Lawyer Online System:

IGEC is working on the development of an Intelligent Lawyer Online Service, to act as the liaison between small business owners and documents governing international trade. The Intelligent Lawyer will consist of an on-line legal knowledge-base, an inference engine, and an intelligent, adaptable, and customizable user interface. The interface will permit the user to interact over the web with the Intelligent Lawyer in a number of common languages. The system will permit three modes of interaction with the knowledge-base: unrestricted browsing, restricted browsing, and direct querying.  The unrestricted browsing mode allows the user to become familiar with the information or knowledge available in the system. The restricted browsing mode assists the user in locating information about a specific topic. The direct querying mode responds to focused user requests. To make the Intelligent Lawyer universally accessible to communities lacking Internet connectivity, alternative access paths, such as telephones and fax machines, will be provided.

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The Electronic Channel Broker:

To facilitate commerce on a global scale, the issue of the distributed, heterogeneous nature of the product/supplier/buyer information chain must be addressed. Currently, after leaving the manufacturer, a product passes through a number of distributors before reaching the consumer, increasing the cost with each link in the chain.  Historically, the information linkages have resided primarily with the distributors. With the advent of the Global Infortmation Infrastructure, however, the consumer has access to a larger fraction of the information flow. To streamline the distribution process and promote global commerce, we are working on developing a matchmaking service, an Electronic Channel Broker, that provides an end-to-end solution for the consumer by considering the complete business transaction.

Matchmaking is a process whereby consumers seeking goods and services with given specifications are put in contact with providers whose goods and services match the specifications. Providers may also reach consumers in a similar fashion. An inherent problem with matchmaking is that the representation of the consumer specifications (typically formed as a query) will differ from the representation of the providers' goods and services. For example, one provider may maintain a structured database of products while another provider may maintain a collection of text documents describing the features of each product. Methods from schema integration and data integration problems from federated databases and heterogeneous systems can be used. The Electronic Channel Broker will utilize exact and approximate similarity query processing methods to perform matchmaking along with EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) for exchange of business data.

The Electronic Channel Broker will consist of user-friendly interfaces for the suppliers and consumers. First, the suppliers and the consumers post their offers and requirements using the web-based interface of the Broker. At the same time shipping agents register the availability of their services with the Broker. The system then evaluates various possibilities for matching a supplier with a consumer via a shipping agent in the most cost-effective manner. As part of this process the Broker establishes profiles for all the parties involved which may be used in the future to expedite transactions. The Broker will perform all communications with financial institutions to perform credit checks and the actual transfer of funds.

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Trading Regulations Infrastructure for Small and Medium Enterprises:

SMEs need to compete in the global marketplace but are operating with an information deficit in the area of international trade regulations and access to documentation. Although some of the required documentation is on-line, currently there exists no SME-friendly infrastructure to assist the distributed population of SMEs in identifying, preparing and routing required the contractual and regulatory paperwork for trading including electronic contracts and tendering with international partners across multi-lingistic and multi-cultural barriers. Though the complexity of
trading documentation (SAD) has been reduced within the EU and NAFTA internationalising trade still further pose immense problems of search, access, interpretation, routing, and support. This deficit constitutes a major barrier to the development of global trading for SMEs.

We are currently working on a system to provide SMEs with affordable and easily packaged access to existing and future databases containing trade information via intelligent data mining tools, to enable SMEs to take full advantage of the Global Information Infrastructure. We have initiated a collaboration between two teams, which collectively have complementary expertise in the areas of SMEs in the electronic marketplace and database technology, to develop a working prototype, which will be operational in a limited domain as an action research test bed aimed at facilitating access for SMEs to international trade regulations, documentation and interpretative support. The proposal brings together two main teams: 1) The European Team headed by University College Cork (UCC) and 2) a large-scale database development team based at the Institute for Global Electronic Commerce. The overall direction of the project would lie with the team at UCC Cork, which would act as the linking interface with the proposed USA-based large database team at UMBC. The Maryland team would act as the coordinating access point within the USA to the wider network.

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