Electronic commerce applications all allow the transfer of electronic data from one point to another. Open EDI--a particular application of electronic commerce--also permits commercial transactions to take place in a fully automated and highly organised trading environment. This volume focuses on open EDI and its relationship with law. When confronted with technology, the typical reaction of the law is to support interpretations and amendments of existing statutes so that old laws can accommodate the change. Open EDI, however, does not fit within this traditional regulatory method. Open EDI permits ad hoc open electronic transactions irrespective of geographical border and jurisdictions among trading partners with no prior trade relationship. By doing so, open EDI limits the possibility of using up-front interchange agreements to address the legal problems of the interchange. It therefore requires the use of legal instruments supported by information technology to overcome legal problems. Openness in an electronic environment has the potential to initiate an unobserved change in law. Possible regulations should address users' need to act in such a trading environment without the inhibition of basic legal concerns. Open EDI and Law in Europe concludes that the challenge of open EDI necessitates working toward a new legal framework based on international law and supported by information technology. This volume will assist lawyers and laypersons concerned with the practical and theoretical aspects of the legal issues of the application of open EDI by pointing out subtle issues in the application of law in this area and by provoking thought regarding possible solutions.

This book outlines and analyses the legislative activity of the Union in terms of Internet and Electronic Commerce Law.

Some analysts predict that electronic commerce will grow to more than $300 billion in the next five years. With electronic commerce growing in exponentially, staying competitive through an effect e-business strategy is a tough challenge. Electronic commerce represents one of the most promising directions for generating competitive advantage at the micro level of the organization and for increasing productivity at the macro level of the economy. Electronic Commerce: Opportunity and Challenges looks at the critical fundamental elements that could impact a user's perception of business-to-business and business-to-consumer electronic commerce. It presents a study of key components and concepts of e-commerce, evaluating the critical success factors for global e-commerce, the economics of e-commerce and the practical issues involved with e-commerce in various applications.

The year 2000 was when the European Union issued its E-commerce Directive. This directive regulates and facilitates e-commerce in the internal market by laying down a clear and general legal framework favorable for business organizations as well as protecting the interests of consumers. This book analyzes the consequences of the legal framework for business organizations involved with e-commerce in Europe.

This volume is a presentation of all methods of legal knowledge representation from the point of view of jurisprudence as well as computer science. A new method of automatic analysis of legal texts is presented in four case studies. Law is seen as an information system with legally formalised information processes. The achieved coverage of legal knowledge in information retrieval systems has to be followed by the next step: conceptual indexing and automatic analysis of texts. Existing approaches of automatic knowledge representations do not have a proper link to the legal language in information systems. The concept-based model for semi-automatic analysis of legal texts provides this necessary connection. The knowledge base of descriptors, context-sensitive rules and meta-rules formalises properly all important passages in the text corpora for automatic analysis. Statistics and self-organising maps give assistance in knowledge acquisition. The result of the analysis is organised with automatically generated hypertext links. Four case studies show the huge potential but also some drawbacks of this approach.

"Digital forensics is the science of collecting the evidence that can be used in a court of law to prosecute the individuals who engage in electronic crime"--Provided by publisher.