Editorial message: special track on e-commerce technologies

The past few years have seen an exponential growth and dramatic changes in the field of e-commerce. The focus of this track is on novel applications for e-commerce, i.e., application that survived the dot-com crash in 2000 and that hold new promises for rapidly evolving electronic markets. A few years ago, e-commerce applications were focused primarily on handling transactions and managing catalogs. Business requirements, however, are evolving beyond transaction support to include content management, mobile and pervasive computing, privacy and personalization, interoperability and integration. The track focuses on technologies currently employed in creating offerings, the latest developments in the electronic marketplace, on computational and deployment issues, architectural support, policies, and advanced solutions and practices. The track is intended to address the current needs of both researchers and practitioners, and to identify significant research challenges that will most beneficially impact the future use of e-commerce applications. The objective of the track is to provide a high quality forum for presentation and exchange of research results, ideas, and practical experiences among applied computer scientists and application developers working in the field of e-commerce. It also aims at bringing together academic and industrial researchers from various fields to discuss current challenges to e-commerce. It is our hope and expectation that the track is useful to the e-commerce research and development community and will help in finding promising future directions. As chairs we feel strongly that e-commerce will continue to be one of the most exciting fields in modern science.