... numbers of businesses announcing partnership with each other in order to provide more dynamic application are increasing every day. Electronic businesses are faced with the fundamental problems of making sure that their applications are not only dynamic but maintaining a high degree of inter-operability between their applications and the businesses with which they collaborate [IRANI01]. 2.1 Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) For the past 25 years, companies have been exchanging information with each other electronically, based on Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards. Unfortunately, EDI currently requires significant technical expertise, and deploys tightly coupled, inflexible architectures. While it is possible to deploy EDI applications on public networks, they are most often deployed on expensive dedicated networks to conduct business with each other. As a result, EDI adoption has been limited to primarily large enterprises and selected trading partners, which represents a small fraction of the world's business entities. Smaller organizations have gone about building ...

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