CHAPTER 7 E-commerce Systems
E-commerce – doing business online
- Online process of developing, marketing, selling,
delivering, servicing, and paying for products & services
transacted
3 BASIC CATEGORIES
1. Business-to-Consumer – sell products/ services to
consumers
2. Business-to-Business – involves electronic business
marketplaces and direct market between businesses
3. Consumer-to-Consumer – between consumers
E-commerce Architecture
Infrastructure of foundation
● Internet - communication network that extends globally
● Intranet - restricted to a particular place and can be
considered as a private network
● Extranet - system is protected even more and is only
accessible to particular people
Functional Scopes
● Customers - secure information, marketing, transaction
processing and payment
● Trading and business partners - Exchange information and
secure transaction
● Employees - Manage the content of operation
E–commerce Processes
- support operation of e-commerce
- also seen in traditional business processes
1. Access control and security – must establish mutual trust
and secure access
- must protect resources from threats
2. Profiling and personalizing – based on personal data
Personalization – process of tailoring pages
3.Search management – helps find specific product or service
Software – may include search engine component
Search engine – coordinated set of programs that includes:
● Spider – goes every website and reads it
● Indexer – creates index from pages that have been read
● Searcher – receives search request, compares it to entries in
index, and returns results
3 TYPES OF WEB
● Free web ● Deep web ● Dark web
4. Content and catalog Management
- personalize content of the website
Content management software – develop text data and
multimedia information
5. Workflow Management System
- determines if the process is ready to move to the next process
Workflow Systems – proper transactions, decisions and work
activities
- Correct data are routed
6. Event Notification – notifies when an event occurred
7. Collaborating and Trading – supports collaboration
arrangement and trading services
Introduction to Database Systems DATABASE SYSTEM
Why Study Databases? A database system consists of:
Databases are useful ● Data (the database) ● Hardware
● Software ● Users
 deal with large amounts of information
 give a set of tools for storing, searching and managing Database systems allow users to:
this information
● Store ● Organise
Databases in CS ● Update ● Protect their data
● Retrieve
 Databases are a ‘core topic’ in computer science
DATABASE USERS
DATABASE – collection of information
1. End users - Use the database system to achieve some goal
- A set of information held in a computer (Oxford English 2. Application developers - Write software
Dictionary) 3. Database Administrator (DBA) - Designs & manages the
- One or more large structured sets of persistent data, database system
usually associated with software to update and query the 4. Database systems programmer - Writes the database
data (Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing) software itself
- A collection of data arranged for ease and speed of
search and retrieval (Dictionary.com) DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

DATABASES EXAMPLE - software that controls the information

● Web indexes ● Airline bookings Examples:

● Library catalogues ● Credit card details ● Oracle ● Ingres

● DB2 (IBM) ● PostgreSQL
● Medical records ● Student records ● MS SQL Server ● MySQL
● Bank accounts ● Customer histories ● MS Access

● Stock control ● Stock market prices - Provides users with

● Personnel systems ● Discussion boards ● Data definition language (DDL)

● Product catalogues ● Data manipulation language (DML)

● Telephone directories ● Data control language (DCL)

● Train timetables
 DBMS PROVIDES • Data integrity
● Persistence ● Security • Data manipulation
● Concurrency ● Data independence ANSI / SPARC ARCHITECTURE
● Integrity ● ANSI - American National Standards Institute
DATA DICTIONARY – METADATA ● SPARC - Standards Planning and Requirements Committee
- or catalog stores information about the database ● 1975 - proposed a framework for DBs
- This is data about data or ‘metadata’
A THREE-LEVEL ARCHITECTURE
● Descriptions of database objects (tables, users, rules, views,
1. INTERNAL LEVEL (systems designers)
indexes)
– Deals with physical storage of data
● Information about who is using which data (locks)
2. CONCEPTUAL LEVEL (database designers and
● Schemas and mappings
administrators)
File based systems – Data is stored in files
– Deals with the organisation of the data as a whole
Problems:
3.EXTERNAL LEVEL (database users)
● No standards ● No way to generate ad hoc queries
– Provides a view of the database tailored to a user
● Data duplication ● No provision for security, recovery,
Parts of the data may be hidden
● Data dependence concurrency
MAPPINGS
Problems with early databases:
– translate information from one level to the next
● Navigating the records requires complex programs
● External/Conceptual ● Conceptual/Internal
● There is minimal data independence
PROVIDE DATA INDEPENDENCE
● No theoretical foundations
● Physical data independence – changes to internal level
RELATIONAL SYSTEMS shouldn’t affect conceptual level
- Information is stored as tuples or records in relations or ● Logical data independence – Conceptual level changes
tables shouldn’t affect external levels
• The relational model covers 3 areas: Introduction to DBMS (Database Management Systems)
• Data structure STAGES OF INFORMATION SYSTEM
● Stage 0: Manual Information System
• Records
• Files
• Index Cards
● Stage 1: Sequential Information Systems
• Tapes
• Files
• slow, non-interactive, redundancy
● Stage 2: File Based Information Systems
• Disk (direct access)
• application program has its own file
data dependence
• data redundancy
● Stage 3: DBMS based Information Systems
• Generalized data management software
• Transaction processing
DATA INDEPENDENCE – Immunity of application to change in
storage structure and access strategy
FUNCTIONS OF DBMS
 Data Definition Language (DDL)
 Data Manipulation Language (DML)
 Data Security and Integrity
 Data Recovery and Concurrency
 Data Dictionary
 Performance
Database normalization/ normalization
– is a process used for data modelling
• Make the database more efficient
• Prevent the same data from being stored in more than
one place (called an “insert anomaly”)
• Prevent updates being made to some data but not others
(called an “update anomaly”)
• Prevent data not being deleted when it is supposed to be,
or from data being lost when it is not supposed to be
(called a “delete anomaly”)
• Ensure the data is accurate
• Reduce the storage space that a database takes up
• Ensure the queries on a database run as fast as possible
Anomaly – issue in the data that is not meant to be there
Normal form – transforms the data to a certain structure
Primary keys – must contain unique values
Foreign key – refers to the primary key in another table
● First Normal Form –There are no repeating groups of
columns
● Second Normal Form – The table is in first normal form and
all the columns depend on the table’s primary key.
● Third Normal Form – table is in second normal form and all
of its columns are not transitively dependent on the primary key