The TrustCoM Approach to Enforcing Agreements between Interoperating Enterprises

Abstract

Abstract. To respond to market opportunities enterprises must interoperate with each other within dynamic virtual organizations (VO) when they do not control the required resources themselves. The TrustCoM project is developing a framework for trust, security and contract management for dynamic VO. The core contribution of the TrustCoM framework is its ability to define a contractual agreement between VO members at a business level and have it specified, monitored and updated at a technical, operational level within a service oriented architecture. The main innovation in TrustCoM is to apply recent research results on policy based security in distributed computing management, role based access control and reputation management to bridge the gap between VO Agreements and managed Web Services. 1. INTRODUCTION In the 1980’s the main interoperability challenge for enterprises was to support syntactic interchange of information within organisations. In the 1990’s the challenge advanced from syntax and structure to address semantics (e.g., Sheth, 1999). One solution to this is to use service oriented architectures implemented as web services or the grid where service interfaces can be clearly defined. The challenge for the early