A service oriented approach to interorganisational cooperation

Abstract

Many E-business applications are based on increased cooperation between various organisational units and partners. System support for such applications can be provided using concepts from the area of service oriented computing - thus lifting inter-organisational integration to a higher level of effectiveness and efficiency. E-services provide means for modularisation of arbitrary organizational assets into components that can be dynamically offered, discovered, negotiated, accessed, and composed in an open application environment. Technically, E-services are software systems that are implemented on top of conventional information and communication technology. As an important step into that direction, Web Services have laid the foundation for interoperable communication between arbitrary systems. This paper introduces an approach to plan, build, and run such application-level services efficiently. Therefore, a fundamental notion of service, originating from distributed systems, is being extended by a specific concept of cooperative interaction processes. Accordingly, an application-level service model and corresponding service engineering mechanisms are proposed and realised as system software middleware based on OGSA Web Services and BPEL4WS processes. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.