CWSC4EC: how to employ context, web service, and community in enterprise collaboration

Abstract

Web services are becoming an essential support for inter-enterprise collaborative business process. Nevertheless, in spite of the crucial progress in Web service technologies there is some shortage especially in the discovery and selection phase. In fact, Web services are selected based on functional criteria. But, in the case of business process collaboration there is a need to consider more pragmatic criteria such as context parameters. In this work we present a framework for collaboration process creation. It enables Web services selection based on contextual description. For this end, we present a novel categorization for the context suitable to the inter-enterprise collaboration. The context categorization is represented using a flexible and dynamic ontology-based model. In order to enhance Web service selection and to improve the manageability of a high number of Web services, we use the community concept in order to gather specific domain Web services. The presented framework uses abstract templates called Goal templates to insure an abstract description of required web services. Goal templates gather both functional and contextual parameters used to select suitable services.