This talk aims at giving an over all view of issues involved in electronic commerce. After a brief introduction to the topic, the technologies enabling ecommerce like data management on the Web, message oriented middleware, distributed transaction processing, agent technologies, data exchange and meta data standards Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) will be briefly introduced. Then the current most promising ecommerce frameworks, that is, CommerceNet's eCo Framework, RosettaNet and BizTalk will be discussed.

Second part of the talk discusses research issues in electronic commerce. In this part, automation of the business processes on the Internet, an ecommerce architecture for B2B ecommerce, personalization on the Internet as well as providing highly personalized information to mobile clients will be addressed.

Finally the European Commission Supported ecommerce projects of METU-SRDC namely, INCO DC 97 2496 MARIFlow, IST 1999-20216 LEVER, IST-2000-26429 HERMES and IST-2000-29478 Think.net will be briefly mentioned.

Prof. Asuman Dogac is a full professor of Department of Computer Engineering at the Middle East Technical University. She is a graduate of Department of Electrical Engineering, Middle East Technical University. Her current research interests include electronic market-places, the automation of supply chain processes, agent based workflow management systems, personalization on the Internet and B2B electronic commerce frameworks. She has published 20 articles in international journals like Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and Journal of Parallel and Distributed Databases. She has 64 papers in refereed international conferences. She has guest edited eCommerce issues of Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases (1999)and ACM Sigmod Record (1998). Prof. Dogac continuously serves as a member of European Commission's "Information Society Technologies (IST) program, Key Action II eWork and eBusiness" evaluation panels. Currently METU-SRDC is involved in 4 projects on eCommerce supported by the European Commission and she is the coordinator of two of these projects.

Prof. Dogac is the recipient of 2000 METU Tarik Somer award and 2000 Mustafa Parlar Science award. She is an Associate Editor of Journal of Database Management, editor of Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases, Associate Editor of ACM Special Interest Group on e-commerce (ACM SIGecom) Newsletter, and editor of International Journal on Information Systems Management (Springer, to start in 2002). She has served on the program committee of several international conferences and as a reviewer to several journals including IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Data & Knowledge Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer, ACM TODS and Communications of the ACM.