IMP: an architecture for virtual enterprises for electronic service delivery

The Internet is already being exploited extensively for electronic commerce. In addition to the purchase of physical goods such as compact disks and books, it is a convenient and powerful mechanism for the delivery of data in digital form. Examples of digital goods might be a movie, a book or demographic data for a city by postal areas. It is also well-suited to services based on specialised processing of data. These derivation services might be based on techniques such as analysis, model-based prediction or optimisation. Examples are determination of the shortest route between two locations in a city and the prediction of share market trends from historical data. Essentially, a provider would use their specialist knowledge to undertake processing for a customer at the provider's site, using hardware and software operated by the provider, rather than distributing that knowledge encapsulated in software. To date, these services have been implemented as self-contained, single-site applications. Integration of data from multiple services remains difficult.