webXice: an infrastructure for information commerce on the WWW

Systems for information commerce on the WWW have to support flexible business models if they are to cover the wide range of requirements that are imposed by the different types of information businesses. This leads to non-trivial functional and security requirements both on the provider side and on the consumer side, for which we introduce an architecture and a system implementation called webXice (Web-enabled eXtended Information and Content Exchange protocol). We focus on the question of how participants with minimal technological requisites, i.e. with just standard Web browsers available, can be technologically enabled to participate in the information commerce at a system level, while not sacrificing the functionality and security required by an autonomous participant in an information commerce scenario. In particular, we propose an implementation strategy to efficiently support persistent message logging for lightweight clients, which enables the clients to collect and manage non-reputable messages as proofs. We believe that the capability to support minimal system platforms is a necessary pre-condition for the widespread use of any information commerce infrastructure.