E-Business Interoperability and Collaboration

Abstract

Current e-business frameworks lack the capability of abstracting the underlying resource infrastructures in order to allow for seamless integration and thus smooth interaction between business entities. Mainly, such frameworks are unable to abstract human, as well as computing resources in a fashion that allows seamless integration into high-level distributed workflow descriptions. Usually, workflows or distributed processes are defined by managers with little background in IT specifications and platforms. Ideally, this should not be necessary at all; however, current solutions do not provide such abstraction support. In this chapter an approach is presented that will overcome this issue allowing for a high-level resource virtualization approach, in particular enabling the integration of human as well as computational resources within high-level workflow descriptions in a SOA fashion.