Semantically Enabled Service-Oriented Architectures: An Enabler for Smart Business Networks

The term Smart Business Networks refers to two things: Firstly, an<br> emerging concept for the agile composition of e-business value chains, and secondly a new stream of research, combining Management and Computer Science. While there exists a coherent vision of Smart Business Networks and the associated functionality, there is insufficient understanding of why creating and maintaining such infrastructure and networks is as difficult as being experienced in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we (1) trace back the complexity of issues such as partner selection, process composition, or execution monitoring to the lack of semantics in the description of system "elements", (2) propose a semantically-enabled service-oriented architecture (SESA) as the foundational layer - or "Operating System" - for Smart Business Networks, and (3) show how our approach may significantly reduce the complexity of the core network management tasks by lifting them to a higher level of abstraction.