New Generation Computing, 30(2012)123-139

Ohmsha, Ltd. and Springer

Dynamic SOA Framework to Support Ad Hoc Enter-
prise Alliance Formation
Jason J. JUNG
Department of Computer Engineering, Yeungnam University
Dae-Dong, Gyeongsan,
SOUTH KOREA, 712-749
j2jung@gmail.com
Received 30 August 2011
Revised manuscript received 16 December 2011
Abstract Collaboration among businesses is needed to successfully
fulll a given task and goal. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been
regarded as an ecient platform to support exible interoperability among
various enterprises by discovering, selecting and composing services. How-
ever, since a large number of enterprises have been participating in this SOA
platform, relationships among these enterprises are getting too complicated
to obtain exibility and scalability for ecient collaboration. Thereby, in
this paper, we propose a dynamic SOA platform to discover service chains
for building ad hoc enterprise alliances where the only relevant enterprises
are sorted out and merged. As a result, given an event, decision makers can
nd out which enterprises (and services from the enterprises) might be se-
lected for their collaboration. The proposed SOA platform has been applied
to mobile advertisement application as a case study. With respect to two
indicators (i.e., precision and agility), we have shown that the proposed SOA
outperforms traditional enterprise collaboration schemes.
Keywords: Service Oriented Architecture, Event-driven SOA, Service Chain,
Enterprise Alliance Formation, Enterprise Network.

1 Introduction
There have been many studies on automating business collaborations. In
case of client-server platforms, message-based transactional processing has been
applied many applications for sharing electronic resources. With emergence of
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), service composition has been regarded as
124 J. J. Jung
an essential and important process for the automated business collaborations.
A number of studies have been proposed to conduct service composition. Sim-
ply, various language models, e.g., WSMO,
1
OWL-S,
2
and SAWSDL
3
have
provided a standardized semantic metadata for describing the services to be
shared.
Such collaborations among enterprises have been applied to many forms
of cooperative business relations, like outsourcing, supply chains, or spontaneous
consortium.
4, 14)
Figure 1 illustrates an example of enterprise collaborations be-
tween multiple businesses in health care market. Two enterprises in pharmacy
business and medical R&D business have to be integrated with others (e.g., med-
ical equipment supplier and health insurance provider) for successfully delivering
their services to customers.
Fig. 1 Health care market model fragmented from Basole and Rouse
(2008);
2)
The small circles indicate the services of the corre-
sponding enterprises, and the curved arrows are relationships
between services.
As shown in Fig. 1, due to various needs and requests from customers,
enterprises have been trying to collaborate with others in many dierent do-
mains. The services can be provided by not only traditional oine businesses
but also online businesses in many commerce areas (e.g., online travel agencies
and third-party logistics). They have a number of problems on heterogeneities.
It means that it is dicult for the enterprises to automatically communicate
and understand with each other. Even though some studies
6, 22)
have proposed
1
Web Service Modeling Ontology, http://www.wsmo.org/
2
OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services, http://www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S/
3
Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema, http://www.w3.org/TR/sawsdl/
Dynamic SOA Framework to Support Ad Hoc Enterprise Alliance Formation 125
semantic approaches to enable the heterogeneous enterprises to understand and
compare meaning of the services, they do not consider scalability and agility
in a dynamic environment. As the number of online and oine enterprises is
increasing, it is getting more dicult to support collaborations among the en-
terprises by conducting SOA activities (e.g., service discovery, orchestration and
composition). In other words, managing the services as well as service chains is
a complicated task.
Thus, in this paper, we focus on enterprise alliance formation in the
dynamic environment. Enterprise alliance in online business is to integrate a
set of virtual organizations (VO) which are closely linked with each other for
achieving a certain unied business goal.
11, 28)
In order for the enterprise alliance
to have better business strategies and tactics, it comes together to eciently
share not only services themselves but also various enterprise resources (e.g., ex-
periences, knowledge, and useful competencies) whose cooperation is supported
through computer networks. By taking into account the sequential links between
services, enterprise alliance is regarded as Service Chain Management (SvCM)
which enables service organizations to meet customer requests and to minimize
costs through intelligent and optimized forecasting, planning and scheduling of
the service chain, and its associated resources such as human, networks and other
assets. Practically, SvCM can be applied to broad areas, covering eld force and
workforce automation, network and asset planning and also aspects of human
resources systems,
21)
enterprise resource planning
24)
and customer relationship
management.
Moreover, in the dynamic environment, agility on discovering service
chains is a crucial factor for enterprise alliance formation. Many events can be
unpredictably occurred in many dynamic environment. Given a certain event,
the SvCM system should be enough agile to build the most relevant service
chains.
Thereby, to deal with these two problems (i.e., scalability and agility) on
supporting collaboration among a large number of heterogeneous businesses, we
focus on enterprise alliance formation in a SOA platform. In this paper, we
claim that a service chain should be congured for better understandability on
SvCM. Given a service network, we can apply network analysis methodologies
which have been introduced in physics and sociology,
30)
and extract meaningful
patterns (e.g., distance, centrality, betweenness, and so on) from a given service
network. Especially, semantic enterprise alliance has been introduced in
1, 5, 11, 14)
.
The common goal of such semantic approaches for business alliances is to au-
tomate interoperability processes between heterogeneous businesses which are
providing various information by referring to their own knowledge structures
(e.g., database schema and ontologies).
9)
We refer to ontology-based SvCM as a
process to manage sharable services annotated by either standard metadata (e.g.,
126 J. J. Jung
BPML,
4
and WPDI-XPDL
5
) or domain ontologies (e.g., BMO,
6
BPEL4WS,
7
and MWSAF
8
) of businesses.
Thus, the main research questions of this study are i) how to discover
meaningful relationships between services and ii) how to apply them to build
the optimized service chain for a given event. Especially, in the context of value
network,
2)
we have to consider more general case where a number of dierent
businesses are participating in an enterprise alliance, as shown in Fig. 1. Since
such relationships between services will be exponentially increased, it is very
dicult for human experts and administrators to manage and understand the
services for a variety of service-oriented processes (e.g., building new services).
It means that a service from a business has to be automatically compared with
other services from dierent business for nding out how they are interrelated
with each other (e.g., semantic relationships). Consequently, once we somehow
have a comparison result attached with a certain relationship, a new service can
be generated by composing two (or more) of the compared services.
The outline of this paper is as follows. In the following Sect. 2, we intro-
duce a denition of service network. Sect. 3 presents network analysis methods
for discovering useful structural patterns from service networks. In Sect. 4, we
describe semantic interoperability dealing with the problem of semantic hetero-
geneity between businesses for service composition, and show a simple example.
Sect. 5 and Sect. 6 will give an experimental results, and discusses some signif-
icant issues and compares our contributions with the previous studies, respec-
tively. Finally, Sect. 7 draws our conclusions of this work.

2 From Enterprise Network to Service Network

Generally, enterprise networks for collaborations among online businesses
tend to be usually static and consistently xed. Such networks are made of not
only standard middleware communication channels (e.g., EDI), integrated secu-
rity packages (e.g., public key infrastructure), but also database integration tools
(e.g., IBM WebSphere Message Broker, SAP Exchange Infrastructure, Microsoft
BizTalk Server and Oracle Enterprise Service Bus). These collaborations have
been done with mutual agreements, market brokers and strategic partnerships.
Denition 2.1 (Enterprise agreement)
Given a set of enterprises B, various Service-Level Agreements (SLA) can be
established between two arbitrary enterprises. According to levels, there are
Corporate-level SLA (C
Cor
), Customer-level SLA (C
Cus
), Service-level SLA
(C
Ser
), and Multilevel SLA. Thus, in this paper, enterprise agreements can be
represented as
R
M
= C
Cor
, C
Cus
, C
Ser
. (1)
4
Business Process Modeling Language. http://www.bpmi.org/
5
Workow Process Denition Interface Language. http://www.wfmc.org/
6
Business Management Ontology. http://www.bpiresearch.com/Resources/
7
Business Process Execution Language for Web Services. http://ifr.sap.com/bpel4ws/
8
METEOR-S Web Service Annotation Framework
19)
Dynamic SOA Framework to Support Ad Hoc Enterprise Alliance Formation 127
In practice, enterprises can exploit Web Services Agreement Specication (WS-
Agreement
9
) to represent them.
Denition 2.2 (Enterprise network)
An enterprise network of a enterprise alliance ^
B
is represented as
^
B
= B, M, R
M
) (2)
where B is a set of enterprises which join to this enterprise alliance, and M
[B[ [B[ means a set of direct partnerships between enterprises which are man-
ually established in real world. Additionally, R
M
is a set of agreement types
made between the corresponding enterprises.
In this paper, we assume that an enterprise alliance is based on SOA com-
puting environment. It means that these enterprises in the enterprise alliance
have to describe the services that they open and provide to any other enter-
prises. These service descriptions are advertised to the others. There should
be a standard language (e.g., WSDL) to make others understand, as shown in
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2 Describing Services with Multiple Ontologies; Concepts can
be derived from local ontologies for semantic annotation of
the services. Also, the dotted arrow between c
3
FT
1
and
c
2
FT
2
indicates the manual alignment declared by human
experts.
Furthermore, this services can contain semantic information (e.g., ontolog-
ical elements) extracted from their local ontologies. This process is also referred
to semantic annotation of business processes.
13, 26)
Even though there are many
dierent denitions on ontologies, in this study, we choose a simplistic approach
9
http://www.ogf.org/
128 J. J. Jung
on ontology engineering by merging a set of faceted taxonomy.
11, 25)
The faceted
taxonomy can include various domain knowledge (e.g., product catalogue) which
is composed of a set of classes.
Denition 2.3 (Faceted taxonomy
11)
)
Given an enterprise B
k
B participating in an enterprise alliance ^
B
, a faceted
taxonomy FT
k
of B
k
can be dened as a set of subclass assertions between
classes (
k
. Hence, FT
k
is given by
FT
k
= c
i
, subc, c
j
)[c
i
, c
j
(
k
, c
j
_ c
i
(3)
where c
i
means a superclass of c
j
.
Once the faceted taxonomies of the parties in the enterprise alliance are
collected, they are merged with each other and regarded as an enterprise alliance
ontology.
Denition 2.4 (Ontology)
An ontology O
B
of an enterprise alliance ^
B
is built by aggregating a set of
faceted taxonomies. Suppose that a set of enterprises B = B
1
, . . . , B
N
be
comprised in an enterprise alliance. Thus, the ontology O
B
is simply formulated
by
O
B
=

B
k
B
FT
k
. (4)
Surely, since we want to remove the duplications, there should be some
process to discover alignments between the faceted taxonomies. More impor-
tantly, given two taxonomies (i.e., FT
a
and FT
b
) from two arbitrary enterprises
(i.e., B
a
and B
b
), domain experts can manually assert alignments
/
B
= c
p
, rel

, c
q
)[c
p
FT
a
, c
q
FT
b
(5)
where rel

indicates the semantic relationship (e.g., equivalence and subsump-

tion) declared by the human expert. The mapping can be expressed with various
relations between classes in dierent faceted taxonomies. It is illustrated as a
dotted arrow (between c
3
FT
1
and c
2
FT
2
) in Fig. 2.
Thus, by using the ontology, the services provided from the enterprise
alliance can be semantically annotated.
Denition 2.5 (Service)
A service can be simply described by semantic annotation process. Thus, we
assume that a service s from B
i
is represented as
s = c
k
[c
k
O
B
(6)
where these concepts are derived from the enterprise ontology O
B
.
Practically, there have been many kinds of software APIs to annotate
Web services. In this work, we have employed SAWSDL4J API provided from
Dynamic SOA Framework to Support Ad Hoc Enterprise Alliance Formation 129
METEOR-S framework.
10
For example, in Fig. 2, some concepts relevant to
Service s
3
are extracted from the ontology O (i.e., c
1
, c
3
, c
5
FT
1
and c
5
,
c
6
FT
2
), and they are attached to the corresponding service. Consequently,
services with semantics are expected to show better interoperability on SOA
environment. More detail on this issue will be explained in Sect. 4.
Given a certain event (or goal), decision makers have to gure out which
services are necessary to execute, and how the services are sequentially con-
nected. Thus, we want to build a service chain to represent all possible relation-
ships between services provided by the enterprise alliance.
Denition 2.6 (Service chain)
Given an enterprise alliance, a service chain ^
S
is dened
^
S
= S, E, R) (7)
where S is a set of services supplied by the enterprise alliance, and E S S
is a chain matrix, meaning a set of relationships between services. Additionally,
R = , _, _, , is a set of semantics for describing the semantics of service
relationships.
By referring to the semantic annotations of the services, we can determine
whether two services are semantically related with each other or not. Practically,
it is dicult for the software systems to automatically discover the relationships
between services. As alignments between faceted taxonomies can be done by
human experts, the service relationships can be attached by human experts
by referring to semantics from ontologies as well as their own experiences and
knowledge.
Figures
Jason J. Jung
1
Knowledge Engineering Laboratory
Department of Computer Engineering
Yeungnam University, Korea
j2jung@gmail.com, j2jung@intelligent.pe.kr
Abstract.
1 Introduction
S
1
S
2
S
3
S
4
S
4
S
5

Fig. 3 An example of service chain with ve services (s

1
to s
5
) and
one auxiliary service (s

4
)
For example, Fig. 3 depicts a simple example of service chain composed
of ve services (i.e., from s
1
to s
5
). When an enterprise join and provide one
auxiliary service (i.e., s

4
), the service chain should be expanded by taking into
account additional relationships with s

4
. Suppose the goal is to obtain the
output from s
5
. By using the auxiliary service s

4
, we may be able to obtain
better results.
10
http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/projects/meteor-s/
130 J. J. Jung

3 Service Chain Analysis

Various measures have been proposed on social networks between people
designed from social network analysis
30)
and from semantic social network.
14)
This is based on topological analysis on the graph-structured information spaces
to discover hidden knowledge underlying the networks. Eventually, we can real-
ize who is the most important person in the social network.
In this context, once we have built a service chain, a number of those
social network analysis methods can be exploited. Then, we can be aware of
importance of individual services on the service chain. This paper claims that
this information is useful for formatting enterprise alliances. Note that these
measures apply only if the service chain is connected with direction. These
measures are often normalized (between 0 and 1) but we present their simplest
form.
Shortest path distance (SPD) Given two arbitrary services s and s

in a
service chain, we can nd out a shortest path SP between them,
and also measure the geodesic distance of the path. It is denoted as
SPD(s, s

). It can be computed by repeating multiplying the chain

matrix E. The larger SPD value between two services is indicating
the poorer relatedness between them.
Closeness centrality The inverse of average length of the shortest path be-
tween a service s and any other services in the service chain is given
by
Closeness(s) =
1

,e,rN
SPD(s, s

)
(8)
where ^ indicates a service chain of the given enterprise alliance.
Betweenness centrality
7)
The proportion of shortest paths between two ser-
vices which contains a particular service (this measures the power of
this service) is given by
Betweenness(s) =

=s=s

,s
(s)
SP(s

, s

)
(9)
where
s

,s
(s) (by Bellman criterion
3)
) indicate the number of short-
est paths p(s

, s

) SP(s

, s

) that service s ^ lies on.

Hub and authority There are dierent but interrelated patterns of power: i)
authorities that are referred to by many good hubs, and ii) hubs that
refers to many good authorities. The highest authorities are those
which are referred to by the highest hubs and the highest hubs that
those which refers to the highest authorities. Kleinberg
16)
proposes
an iterative algorithm to measure authority and hub degree of each
entity in interlinked environment. Hence, given initial authority and
hub degrees of 1, the degrees are iteratively computed by
Hub
t+1
(s) =

,e,rN
i
Auth
t
(s

) and (10)
Dynamic SOA Framework to Support Ad Hoc Enterprise Alliance Formation 131
Auth
t+1
(s) =

,e,rN
i
Hub
t
(s

) (11)
where SPD(s, s

) = 1.
Similarly to betweenness, the hub weight indicates the structural position
of the corresponding service.
15)
It is a measure of the inuence that services
have over the spread of information through the service chain. From a given
Fig. 1, we can measure various measurements of each enterprise (or each service
by an enterprise). As a simple example, with respect to the closeness ([B[ =
10) in Eq. (8), the closenesses of Goverment&Policy Makers, R&D Labora-
tories, and Health Providers are
9
1 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 8 + 8
= 0.28,
9
1 +1 +2 +2 +2 +3 +3 +4 +8
= 0.35, and
9
1 +1 +1 +2 +3 +3 +2 +1 +2
=
0.56, respectively (Distance from unreachable services is assigned with N 1).
Thus, we can guarantee that Health Providers has been located in more im-
portant position rather than the others.

4 Interoperability by Enterprise Alliance

Semantic heterogeneity problem between businesses is caused by several
reasons. Formation of the knowledge are semantically distinct with each other,
because the knowledge are designed by experiences and heuristics of the lo-
cal experts (or administrators). It means that semantic information extracted
from the knowledge may be heterogeneous with the others. Such heterogeneities
are caused by the dierence of not only the terminologies (e.g., synonyms and
antonym), but also, more importantly, the knowledge structures (e.g., database
schema
8)
and ontologies
11)
). Consequently, it is dicult for the enterprises to be
integrated, and more importantly, it is impossible for the enterprise alliances to
automatically achieve strategic cooperations (e.g., i) business rules, e.g., strate-
gies and policies, and ii) hierarchical taxonomies for describing the resources)
with heterogeneous enterprise alliances.
In order to overcome this drawback, we have focused on semantic inter-
operability between virtual enterprises.
11)
A large number of enterprises have
been inter-related with the others in a same enterprise alliance or dierent en-
terprise alliances for performing ad-hoc (or real-time) collaboration. In order
to provide ecient interoperability between the enterprises, the heterogeneities
between the corresponding ontological knowledge structures have to be dealt
with. Thereby, we have to consider ecient alignment method to resolve their
conicts. While intra-alignment is a process merging all local ontologies into
an organizational ontology, inter-alignment is a process mapping all semantic
correspondences between two organizational ontologies.
We have proposed an ecient method to build an integrated enterprise
alliance by mapping heterogeneous ontologies of enterprises, i.e., maximizing the
summation of partial similarities between a set of possible pairs of classes. The
partial similarity can be calculated by comparing both set of instances in the
classes. After both ontologies are aligned at conceptual level, and the source
132 J. J. Jung
ontology instances are transformed into the target ontology entities according to
those semantic relations.
4.1 Discovering Semantic Relationships between Services
For unveiling the relationships between services, we have to gure out the
relationships between the corresponding descriptions (i.e., concepts). Thus, we
have to conduct ontology matching process. After ontology matching process,
11
the alignments between heterogeneous ontologies can be represented as a set of
pairs of concepts from two dierent ontologies. We refer these concept pairs to
correspondences (e.g., equivalence or subsumption).
Denition 4.1 (Alignment)
Given two ontologies FT
i
and FT
j
, the alignments between two ontologies are
represented as a set of correspondences CRSP
ij
= c, rel, c

)[c FT
i
, c

FT
j

where rel means the relationship between c and c

, by maximizing the summation

of class similarities.
Finally, alignment process makes heterogeneous enterprise alliances inter-
operable (even partially) among them. For example, local users in an enterprise
alliance can easily and transparently access to the other enterprise alliances. To
do so, enterprise alliances have to conduct the ontology matching process in ad-
vance. Suppose that a set of enterprise alliances B = B
1
, . . . , B
N
should be in-
teroperable with each other. Alignment process can nd out the correspondences
between all pairs of ontologies, i.e., B
i
obtains N 1 sets of correspondences.
Table 1 Service Relationship Discovery by Semantic Matching Process
Scope Service description Semantic relationships
In a same d
s
= d
s
s s

enterprise d
s
d
s
s s

alliance d
s
d
s
= not decidable
In a dierent d
s
= d
s
, d
s
d
s
, d
s
d
s
= not decidable
enterprise {c, , c

|c d
s
, c

d
s
} CRSP
ij
s s

alliance {c, , c

|c d
s
, c

d
s
} CRSP
ij
s s

Most importantly, given two services s from B

i
and s

from B
j
in a seman-
tic SvCM, the relationship between both of them should be discovered. Table 1
shows a simple example of patterns for establishing relationships between ser-
vices. Certainly this table can be expanded, according to the strategies on the
SvCM.
4.2 Example
In this section, we want to show a simple example based on service net-
work analysis methods. While on a conventional marketplace with online and
oine enterprises, the enterprises are interlinked with each other by mutual
agreements and contracts (e.g., supply chains), we have been considering in-
tegrating and merging the link-based structures from several business sectors.
11
We skip ontology matching processes. Please refer to other literatures
23)
for more details.
Dynamic SOA Framework to Support Ad Hoc Enterprise Alliance Formation 133
When we need to nd out the best service chain for achieving a certain goal
(i.e., sequentially aggregating enterprises until customers), the best one should
be selected out of a set of all possible service chains by taking into account the
semantic interoperability between the enterprises.
As shown in Fig. 1, manufacturing industry sector (e.g., equipment sup-
pliers) can be automatically integrated with medical producer sector (e.g., phar-
macy wholesalers). Moreover, if they have semantic-based information systems
on open networks, we can obtain semantic relationships between such enterprises
located in dierent sectors. For example, by matching pairs of ontologies,
S(O(Medical Equipment Supplier), O(Health Wholesalers)) = 0.64
S(O(Other Equipment Supplier), O(Pharmaceuticals Supplier)) = 0.33
we can realize that among all possible service chains from R&D Laboratories
to Customers, Medical Equipment Supplier and Health Wholesalers is
more closely related with each other, compared to Other Equipment Supplier
and Pharmaceuticals Supplier.

5 Experimentation
We have evaluated our contributions of this paper by considering two
main issues; i) human evaluation of building service chain networks, and ii)
performance evaluation (i.e., scalability) of discovering the best service chain
with a certain event in a dynamic computing environment.
5.1 Mobile Advertisement: a Case Study
To test the proposed SOA platform, we have selected a mobile advertise-
ment system as a case study. As mobile devices (e.g., cellphone) have been widely
used, many businesses have been trying to send advertisement to customers for
increasing their prots and revenues. Moreover, they are getting focusing on
location-based advertisement. Once they are aware of the context (i.e., loca-
tion) of the target customer, they can choose the most relevant advertisements.
However, it is dicult for the advertisement systems to send the informa-
tion. They need to consider various conditions of their partners in the enterprise
alliance. Thereby, the proposed SOA platform can discover which services (and
service providers) are most relevant to the customers by analyzing the service
chain network.
Table 2 Specication of the Testing-bed for the Proposed SOA Platform
Enterprise alliance MA
1
MA
2
MA
3
Total
Number of enterprises 16 14 13 43
Number of services 153 94 137 384
Average number of services 9.6 6.7 10.5 8.9
Thus, as a testing-bed, we have collected 384 services by interviewing
with 3 mobile advertisement companies (i.e., MA
1
, MA
2
, and MA
3
) in Korea.
We can consider each of the advertisement companies as an enterprise alliance.
Table 2 is showing the specication of the test-bed for the service chain network.
134 J. J. Jung
In average, average number of services of each enterprise is 8.9, while it is 10.5
in MA
3
. It means a service chain network of MA
3
is the densest one.
Regarding the ontologies, we have asked the enterprises to build their
own faceted taxonomies. The human experts from each alliance have manually
integrated them, and nally, we have collected three ontologies.
5.2 Experimental Results
To evaluate scalability of the proposed SOA platform, we have measured
the computation times of discovering the service chains. We have exploited
betweenness to nd the service chains and compare it to brute force approach.
Figure 4 shows computation time in three enterprise alliance, as the num-
bers of enterprises get increased. We have found out that the proposed SOA
platform has outperformed in all the alliances (by 23%, 19%, and 22%). Es-
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Computation time (msec)
Brute force
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
Betweenness

0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
1800
4 6 8 10 12 14
Computation time (msec)
Brute force
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
Betweenness

0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
4 6 8 10 12
Computation time (msec)
Brute force
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ +
Betweenness

Fig. 4 Scalability Testing on Three Enterprise Alliances

Dynamic SOA Framework to Support Ad Hoc Enterprise Alliance Formation 135
pecially, mobile advertisement company MA
1
has shown the best performance.
Since the enterprises in MA
1
are in the similar industrial domain (i.e., enter-
tainment), their ontologies are strongly connected with each other. As a result,
the service chains have been eciently managed, even though the number of
enterprises is larger than those of the others.

6 Discussion and Related Work

Here, we want to put some discussion about the Web Services. Web
Services have been regarded as one possible way of realizing the technical as-
pects of the so-called SOA (service-oriented architecture). These services can be
new applications or just wrapped around existing legacy systems to make them
SOA-enabled. Common technologies for developing web services are WSRF,
12
SOAP,
13
UDDI
14
and WSDL.
15
Furthermore, when using these technologies,
XML is a basic technology for developing web services this way. For reasoning
aspects, a Web Service is interesting if several reasoning components are avail-
able and accessible through the use of indexes possibly managed by other entity
(a broker). A user is able to request a specic reasoning component by checking
the indexes of the storage. For this, three instances can be identied, a service
consumer, a service provider and a Service Broker (storage of indexes).
There have been several important research issues on dealing with seman-
tic matching between information systems. For doing this, many studies have
been proposed to provide interoperability by discovering and integrating local
knowledge structures between VOs.
5)
They can be briey noted into three issues;
Incremental discovery of local knowledge,
10)
Knowledge matching (including schema and ontology matching),
23)
and
Interoperability via third-party platforms, e.g., service-oriented architec-
ture (SOA).
27)
Moreover, human understandability is also important problem for taking
care of a large-scaled services and resources. In fact, in this work, we are focusing
on supporting local users (e.g., decision makers) through aligning the ontologies
applied to annotate (or classify) the services on enterprise alliances. It means
the local users in a certain enterprise alliance can access to the other enterprise
alliances which are not familiar with them. Unlike a centralized portal systems
(e.g., meta search engines), the local users can be provided with a set of concept
mapping extracted from direct alignments, so that they can deploy meaningful
translation services (e.g., query expansion
20)
and transformation).
We can think of some related work which should be compared with the
proposed work. Third party logistics
31, 32)
is an important domain to consider the
service integration and composition for optimal solutions. Similarity, on-demand
e-supply chain integration
12, 29)
has proposed a real-time approach to solve the
12
Web Service Resource Framework
13
Simple Object Access Protocol
14
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration
15
Web Service Description Language
136 J. J. Jung
service heterogeneity problems.
These systems have been employed to a various domains like geographi-
cal location-based system,
33)
competitive partner selection,
21)
and collaborative
service chain.
24)

7 Conclusions and Future Work

Services have been regarded as a key factor on business success. In the
context of information engineering domain, a large amount of information from
(and to) enterprises should be eciently processed and manipulated to maximize
the values by integrating relevant businesses together. Particularly, service-
oriented architecture (SOA) is regarded as an ecient platform to exchange
services (e.g., publishing and subscribing services) between enterprises. Within
SOA platforms, XML-based standards have been employed by the enterprises.
Recently, service-dominant logic
18)
has been signicantly emphasized on
many researchers in various domains of management, social, and engineering
science.
17)
This paper is a theoretical paper for introducing a basic idea of ser-
vice network analysis. We have presented a conceptual framework to integrate
multiple service networks which had been isolated only in individual business
sectors into a global service network. Hopefully, the services can be annotated
with business ontologies, so that the ontology alignment algorithms are e-
ciently applied to nd out the relationships between services. In addition, we
want to note that the services mentioned in this paper is derived from online en-
terprises as well as from oine enterprises. More importantly, traditional social
network methods can be applied to understand the topological patterns from
the integrated service networks.
As future work, we want to describe research limitations and problems
that we have been realizing during this study as follows;
Legacy problem: It is dicult for oine legacy enterprises to put seman-
tics into them. We are expecting some machine learning approached to
deal with this issue.
Semantic description of services: There have been several service ontolo-
gies and service metadata.
Human understandability: A study and system on service visualization
or service network visualization are needed to increase understandability
of human users.
Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Research
Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MEST)
(No. 2011-0017156).
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Dynamic SOA Framework to Support Ad Hoc Enterprise Alliance Formation 139
Jason J. Jung, Ph.D.: He is an assistant professor in Yeungnam
University, Korea, since September 2007. He was a postdoctoral
researcher in INRIA Rhone-Alpes, France in 2006, and a visit-
ing scientist in Fraunhofer Institute (FIRST) in Berlin, Germany
in 2004. He received the B.Eng. in Computer Science and Me-
chanical Engineering from Inha University in 1999. He received
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Information Engineer-
ing from Inha University in 2002 and 2005, respectively. His
research topics are knowledge engineering on social networks by
using machine learning, semantic Web mining, and ambient in-
telligence.