Electronic business offers opportunities and threats for the firms in business networks, triggering established and new intermediaries to introduce their own electronic business initiatives. Despite their potential, successful designs of electronic intermediaries leading to acceptance by buyers and sellers are intricate and not well understood. The design of an electronic intermediary involves careful balancing of the interests of actors within a vertical business network.In this paper we analyze the design of an electronic intermediary in the maritime sector, and how this design relates to the voluntary acceptance of the intermediary by buyers and sellers. We discuss design choices and expected interests for all actors from the perspective of the intermediary. Acceptance approaches the electronic intermediary from the perspectives of buyers and sellers.The case study shows design choices for a limited role with restricted transparency and little novelty. These choices come mostly with positive expectations of the intermediary for buyers, sellers, and itself. Acceptance results confirm these expectations. Buyers and sellers are moderately positive and satisfied. However, there is the danger that the design has too little added value to convince users, especially buyers.

A coherent description of architectures provides insight, enables communication among different stakeholders and guides complicated (business and ICT) change processes. Unfortunately, so far no architecture description language exists that fully enables integrated enterprise modeling. In this paper we focus on the requirements and design of such a language. This language defines generic, organization-independent concepts that can be specialized or composed to obtain more specific concepts to be used within a particular organisation. It is not our intention to re-invent the wheel for each architectural domain: wherever possible we conform to existing languages or standards such as UML. We complement them with missing concepts, focusing on concepts to model the relationships among architectural domains. The concepts should also make it possible to define links between models in other languages. The relationship between architecture descriptions at the business layer and at the application layer (business-IT alignment) plays a central role.

Knowledge based logics and knowledge based protocols allow to give generic specifications of network protocols and distributed algorithms in general.The question of how to transform a knowledge based program into a standard one is still large] y unsolved however.In this paper we propose two knowledge oriented actions, COMBINE and NOTIFY, that allow for the transformational development of standard protocols from knowledge based specifications and protocols.These actions combine distributed knowledge and spread knowledge respectively.Using NOTIFY and COMBINE one can give generic implementations and specifications of a large class of network protocols, and can derive implementations tailored to specific rtrchitectures in a straightforward, transformational way.The method to derive implementations relies on the notions of layering and communication closeness.It is applicable to a large class of protocols that have an underlying sequential structure.We illustrate the approach with the derivation of an algorithm to compute distances in networks and some smaller examples, aiming at implementations using asynchronous message passing.However, the method can be used in other settings as well.

Analysis and design of distributed algorithms and protocols are difficult issues. An important cause for those difficulties is the fact that the logical structure of the solution is often invisible in the actual implementation. We introduce a framework that allows for a formal treatment of the design process, from an abstract initial design to an implementation tailored to specific architectures. A combination of algebraic and axiomatic techniques is used to verify correctness of the derivation steps. This is shown by deriving an implementation of a distributed minimum weight spanning tree algorithm in the style of [GHS].