Composing and Maintaining Web-based Virtual Enterprises

Electronic commerce (E-commerce) is evolving from the simple notion of electronic catalogs to the notion of virtual enterprises (VEs). Existing enterprises form alliances, joining their services in order to share their costs, skills and resources in o ering a value-added service. Ad-hoc and proprietary solutions on the one hand, and lack of a canonical model for composing and managing VEs on the other hand, have largely hampered a faster pace in deploying Web-based VEs. In this paper, we propose a generic framework for creating and maintaining VEs. We introduce a language, WebBIS-SDL, to cater for the de nition and maintenance of VEs. To provide an early feasibility of the proposed framework, we have implemented a prototype that allows easy de nition and maintenance of VEs. The implementation architecture is based on CORBA and provenWeb technologies including Java and database APIs.