Support of Semantic Interoperability in a Service-based Business Collaboration Platform

Abstract

The paper describes a system prototype that is aiming at the provision of an environment for flexible project-oriented collaboration of networked enterprises, so-called virtual business alliances. The system, which was developed within the FP7 project SPIKE, employs the technology of semantically enhanced service bus, supported by underlying semantic structures such as ontologies and abstract business process models. The focus of this approach is to achieve effective interoperability of possibly heterogeneous services provided and consumed by members of the collaboration environment. The architecture of the main system modules is presented and the processing of semantically annotated services orchestrated in a collaboration workflow is explained in more details.