Services discovery as a mean to enhance software resources sharing in Collaborative Networks

Abstract

Collaborative Networks (CN) realization fundamentally relies on the need of collaboration, from diverse perspectives, among partners. From the software perspective, CN members who have SOA-based solutions keep the involved web-services at their local silos. This means that the collaboration potential of CNs might be enlarged and reinforced if such silos could be opened up and shared among their members, hence decreasing development and hosting costs. This is relevant as CN members are mostly composed of small and medium size companies with usual high limitations of ICT resources. This paper presents the result of an exploratory research that proposes a model for service discovery as a mechanism to leverage software services sharing among partners under the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) access and business models. The developed model allows discovering the most suitable services for the required business processes, considering their contexts (using the UBL standard) and quality of services (QoS). A prototype has been developed to show the concepts. The assessment of the model is given in the end. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.