Call U Back: An Agent-Based Infrastructure for Mobile Commerce

Mobile commerce (M-commerce) is an attractive research area due to its relative novelty, rapid growth, and great potential in business applications. Over the last decade, various M-commerce applications have been geared to target mobile users and achieved great success. However, most M-commerce applications are developed by different retailers for special purposes and thus lack fully automated business processes to integrate various existing services. This paper presents a novel infrastructure, Call U Back (CUB), for M-commerce applications. The proposed scheme integrates concepts of agent and contextaware workflow to implement automated trading tasks and compose services dynamically. The context awareness is based on ontology and logic models which derive from a set of descriptive contextual attributes for knowledge sharing and logical inference. Based upon the context-aware workflow analysis, the system will generate automated intelligent agents to conduct commerce transactions on behalf of mobile users. The middleware layer of the CUB server has been implemented. An experimental prototype of the system is under development and testing.