On-demand business collaboration enablement with web services

Businesses are increasingly outsourcing key operations and interacting with ever extending nets of partners. Running extended business-to-business (B2B) operations creates the need for more advanced human interaction while advancing the automation base of B2B functions. In this paper, we introduce a model for on-demand business process-based collaboration, namely, Extended Business Collaboration (eBC), and its major elements of modeling, and a configurable business protocol-enabling framework. We discuss some of the major research issues associated with facilitating extended business collaboration, and present our proposed Annotated Business HyperChain technology leveraging Web services and semantic annotation model. A research prototype is described, followed by some observations and discussion of open research issues requiring further exploration. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.