B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Software Agents 405
The developers of Web agent technology recognized that they could
solve both problems at once — create a global Web agent vocabulary
and a global Web agent naming and addressing system — by designing
a new Internet name service based on XML (see Figure 13.9). Thus
Extensible Name Service (XNS) was born. In short, XNS is to DNS
what XML is to HTML.
13.11. Conclusion
Current trends have made it clear that the complexity of B2B ecommerce
and the software that enables it will increase dramatically in
the coming decades. The focus has to be on infrastructure, negotiation,
information gathering and transactional technology to ensure a smooth
transaction from proper goods selection to final payment and goods
delivery.
Intelligent agents are the most promising paradigm for facing these
challenges, overcoming the difficulties and exploiting the opportunities
associated with B2B e-commerce.
However, if intelligent agent technology is going to survive, it has to
be able to deal effectively with the most important characteristics of
B2B e-commerce: global business and information infrastructure. B2B
e-commerce is very dynamic, large, distributed, heterogeneous, open
and constantly evolving. The dynamic and distributed nature of both
data and applications require that software agents not merely respond to
requests for information but intelligently anticipate, adapt and actively
seek ways to support users. Intelligent systems should not only assist in
coordinating tasks among humans, they must also communicate, cooperate
and collaborate among distributed programs.
In the long-term, agents will approximate true 'smartness', in that
they can collaborate and learn, in addition to being autonomous in their
settings. They will possess rich negotiation skills and some may
demonstrate what may be referred to, arguably, as 'emotions'.