Supporting software services discovery and sharing in collaborative networks

Abstract

Collaborative Networks (CN) realization fundamentally relies on the need of collaboration among involved partners. CN members who have SOA-based solutions keep the involved web-services at their local silos. This means that the CN potential in terms collaboration could be enlarged and reinforced if such silos could be opened up and shared among CN members, so decreasing development and hosting costs. This is particularly relevant as CN members are mostly composed of small companies. This paper presents a result of an exploratory research, proposing a model for dynamic service discovery based on Software-as-a-Service business model, which considers not only services' functional requirements, but also the requested QoS and business processes' context. A prototype has been developed to show the concepts. A preliminary assessment from the ICT and CN perspectives is given in the end. © 2010 IFIP.