ICEC '05 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Electronic commerce
The Knowledge Engineering Review
International Journal of Organizational and Collective Intelligence
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Despite recent uprising of the Web Servicestechnology for programmed interfaces ofbusiness-to-business (B2B) E-commerce services(e-services) over the Internet, most sites (e.g.,online purchases) can only support HypertextMarkup Language (HTML) for human interactionsthrough web browsers. Automating client access tothese services generally requires developingsophisticated programs to simulate human accessby handling HTML pages and forms. However,these HTML interfaces vary across web sites, andare often subjected to changes. Client maintenanceis therefore tedious and expensive. This paperpresents a novel approach to automate dialogs withweb-based services, using a high-level scriptlanguage, called WebXcript. WebXcript providesfeatures for HTML forms based dialogues and XMLmessaging. The XML syntax of WebXcript furtherenables convenient user authoring and easy enginedevelopment with extensively available XML tools.It supports expected responses and exceptionhandling. We further propose a wrapperarchitecture to integrate heterogeneous WebServices based on WebXcript. We demonstrate theapplicability of our approach with examples inintegrating distributed information, online ordering,and XML messaging.