Collaborative Business Services Research Articles

An ontology-based collaborative business service selection: contributing to automatic building of collaborative business process

With worldwide inter-enterprise collaboration and interoperability background, automatic collaborative business process deduction is a crucial researching subject. We have designed a methodology of deducing collaborative process by only collecting collaborative objectives and partners’ business services. The two key problems are (i) selecting corresponding business services for a set of collaborative objectives and (ii) ordering business services with serializations and parallelization. This paper aims to present a solution of business service selection and the following business process extraction. In order to solve the problem, we have defined a collaborative ontology, which contains numerous instances of business services and processes from the MIT process handbook. The collaborative ontology contains essential concepts in collaborative situations and process-deducing rules and algorithms. We provide a brief illustration of implementation within a SaaS toolkit called Mediator Modeling 2ool.

Collaborative Business Service Modelling in Knowledge-Intensive Enterprises

Nowadays, knowledge-intensive enterprises, which offer knowledge-based products and services to the market, play a vital role in the knowledge-based economy. In the global networked age, collaborative business services have raised as one of the most important knowledge-intensive services that help enterprises to gain the competitive advantage. These services greatly depend on the ability to use network architectures to collaborate efficiently with business partners. This paper introduces the KB-CBSM (Knowledge-Based Collaborative Business Service Modelling) approach, which aims at providing a conceptual foundation for modelling effectively and improving incrementally collaborative business services in knowledge-intensives enterprises. The paper begins by presenting the necessity and principles of the KB-CBSM approach. Next, it presents the conceptual foundation that consists of three levels: Service value creation network, Service system and Service levels. The paper continues with a discussion and review of the relevant literature and ends with the conclusion and suggestions for further research.

Modelling collaborative business services

Collaborative business services represent the collaboration of business service domains across organisations. This collaboration is characterised by the interdependencies of business activities and business resources between business partners. These interdependencies require information and process sharing within constraints to ensure consistency across organisations. Most approaches for collaborative business service analyses fall into two categories: 1) those based on business-process modelling perspectives using a business process modelling language; 2) those based on collaboration patterns such as network topology or interaction patterns. However, no studies examine the connections between the two categories even though collaboration patterns influence business-process management. In this paper, we investigate the sharing of different aspects of business objects such as data value and behaviours in the context of collaborative services. We formalise this approach with a collaboration framework, and present constraints emerged. To implement the framework, we develop a model of collaborative business services and evaluate its effectiveness.

Information-Driven Framework for Collaborative Business Service Modelling

In the context of a network of enterprises, the competitive advantage of each enterprise depends greatly on the ability to use network architectures to collaborate efficiently in business services. The paper introduces a conceptual framework, called the CBSM (Collaborative Business Service Modelling) framework, which provides an intellectual foundation for understanding thoroughly and modelling effectively collaborative business services. The paper begins by presenting the necessity for and principles of the conceptual framework. Then it presents the architecture of the CBSM framework that consists of three different levels: the service level for service operation, the service system level for service creation, and the service value creation network level for service proposal. The paper continues with a discussion and review of the relevant literature, followed by the conclusion and suggestions for further research.

Introduction: Advances in E-business engineering

E-business is more than just e-commerce. It is one of the most challenging areas for industry and research communities. E-business has evolved from business-to-business, business-to-customer, customer-to-business, customer-tocustomer, and business-to-government systems to the integrated and collaborative business services among various information systems and e-marketplaces. In this evolving process, integrated e-business systems and their related supporting platforms have to be rapidly designed and developed in order to meet different requirements. A variety of e-business engineering paradigms and technologies have been developed to tackle these challenges. There are many research issues needed to be addressed. These issues include heterogeneous services integration, disparate e-business functions collaboration, semantic level e-business messaging, etc. Today, not only large companies, but also medium or small-sized companies are learning that e-business is a required component of doing business. As a result, there is a growing demand for insights into challenges, issues, and solutions related to the design, implementation, and management of e-business systems. To respond to the market needs from both academic researchers and practitioners, and to communicate research results on e-business engineering, a number of related conferences organized by the IFIP TC8 WG8.9, IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on E-Commerce, and IEEE SMC Society Technical Committee on Enterprise Information Systems have been held in the past years. Such conferences include IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering, IFIP International Conference on Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems (Confenis), IEEE SMC International Conference Special Session on Enterprise Information Systems, GCIS, and WCSE. These conferences plus workshops have provided an international forum for researchers in academia and industry to present their most recent findings in e-business engineering. This special issue of Information Technology and Management presents expanded versions of 12 papers from the above-mentioned conferences held recently. The purpose of this special issue is to report on the state-of-the-art of, and emerging trends in, research and practice in e-business engineering. To prepare for this issue, all authors were asked to respond to two rounds of peer review. Each paper emphasizes the importance of e-business engineering from a unique perspective. In the paper by Academician Shoubo Xu of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a new concept of management is proposed. The author indicates that ‘‘to manage’’ means to lead, to plan, to organize and to control; and ‘‘to reason’’ means to understand the law of the development of objects being managed. This new concept is an integration of the two elements of ‘‘managing’’ and ‘‘reasoning’’. As such, management is to study the contradictory relationship between ‘‘managing’’ and ‘‘reasoning’’, and consider how such a relationship develops and changes. The paper discusses its broad applications including information industry such as e-business. Qian, Jin and Fang of the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in their paper entitled ‘‘Heuristic algorithms for effective broker deployment’’, proposes a model for the broker deployment problem, and presents two heuristic algorithms for the multi-object optimization of broker deployment. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. L. Li (&) Department of Information Technology and Decision Sciences, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA e-mail: lli@odu.edu

Realizing Automatic Conversion of Service Models into Web Services towards Dynamic and Adaptive Business Process Management

The highly competitive and rapidly changing nature of the current business environment creates tremendous pressure on organizations to collaborate. This led to utterly different type of business eco-system in which individual organizations in collaborative business services increasingly demand for a collaborative business process that can easily adapt to changes. As a result, the development and management of organization's IT infrastructures that can able to cope up with the requirements of dynamic and flexible business environments are challenging. Service-based approach can enhance the development and management of collaborative processes through service abstraction to satisfy the needs of today's dynamic business environment. Service-oriented computing paradigm uses service models to represent the requirements of continuously changing business needs through service abstraction and use platform independent interaction nature of web service and its enabling available technologies for implementation. Hence, in this paper we discussed the collaborative BPM trends and concepts, technologies and proposed a generic framework to realize automatic conversion of service models into Web services in order to support dynamic and adaptive development of collaborative business process and deploy them over the internet through a web service standards platform.