Service-based interoperability and collaboration for enterprise networks

Enterprise collaboration has generated in the past years a consistent background of scientific and industrial knowledge, providing strong support for managers on organisation interoperability and collaboration. Networks fostering enterprise collaboration, often referred to as ‘collaborative networks’ or ‘enterprise networks’, now have solid foundations, with sound references in both academia and industry. Among various propositions for the implementation of enterprise networks, the notion of ‘service orientation’ has emerged in the recent years as a key enabler, especially well suited for collaborative networks. The goal of this special issue is to establish an international state of the art of the convergence between ‘collaborative networks’ and ‘service orientation’. In the context of enterprise collaboration, service orientation can be studied at both the business and the information system levels. The alignment between these two levels is a key factor for the success in enterprise network’s competitiveness. Therefore, service-driven architecture (SDA) – at the business level of information systems – and service-oriented architectures (SOA) – at the technical level – have to be jointly considered, to enable a good alignment between business services defined at the upper level and IT or Web services defined at the lower level, improving the potential adaptation capabilities of enterprise networks. The special issue has been supported by the IFIP Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises (PROVE, http://www.pro-ve.org/), the Society of Collaborative Network (SoColNet, an international technical and scientific association on collaborative networks, http://www.socolnet.org/), and the Research Network GDR-MACS (Working Group EasyDIM on Enterprise Modelling and Engineering) Seven papers have been selected to cover this specific topic situated at the crossroads of ‘collaborative networks’ and ‘service orientation’. The selected papers have been organised in three main sections of the special issue: