Overview

Electronic Commerce, with the World Wide Web as the infrastructure of the global information society, will almost certainly be the next major event in the history of the Web. Work on Electronic Commerce is proceeding at many levels in many different fora, from industry consortia to national and international standards organizations, to national and international regulatory and legal areas. This meeting is an opportunity for W3C member companies to advise the W3C staff on the appropriate role for the Consortium in this increasingly important and complex arena.

W3C's central focus is always on maintaining the interoperability of the Web, helping the Web evolve without fragmentation. Thus, the theme of this meeting is "Electronic Commerce and Interoperability." We have invited a number of speakers to provide up-to-the-minute background information about three areas:

• The view from Europe: why is ECommerce important, what is the political and regulatory climate, what is the U.S doing, and where is ECommerce headed.
• Micropayments: what problems discovered during recent implementation experience can be addressed by standards from the Web community.
• SmartCards and SET: integration issues that arise in real-world deployment.

With this background, there will be an opportunity for presentations by member companies on their own work. The afternoon will be devoted to a general discussion of possible roles for W3C, including (but not limited to):

• creating consensus around important interfaces;
• modifications to existing protocols (HTTP, HTTP-NG) or data formats (HTML, RDF);
• relation to existing projects and standardization efforts;
• education of the regulatory bodies.

This meeting is the second in a series of three Interest Group Meetings being held in Brussels. On Tuesday, the Security Interest Group will hear a presentation on RDF (Resource Description Framework) and certificate infrastructures that may be instructive to participants in the Electronic Commerce Interest Group. All meetings are open to members of the W3C.

Agenda

$Date: 1998/02/06 14:34:40 $