Universal Enterprise Integration: Challenges of and Approaches to Web-Enabled Virtual Organizations

We began the call for papers for this special issue by implying that the foremost challenges to web-enabled virtual organizations were due to the need to spontaneously link different organizations: entities with different worldviews, different cultures, different processes, different descriptions for their processes and different and even divergent goals. Further, we stressed two points. First, this is a previously defined problem, that of the “integration of semantically heterogeneous entities” and much research has been devoted to the problem across many fields over many years. Second, the WWW, with the potential for the linking of constantly evolving global mass of consumers and producers via a common technological infrastructure, has brought new salience and technical difficulties to these time honored (and only partially solved) problems. We find in the papers in this issue that the time-honored approaches to the problem (or conceptual lenses used to view the problem) continue. However the same technological infrastructure that accentuates the semantic heterogeneity issue yields the potential for new solutions. Though the traditional lenses are still in place, the distinctions along all dimensions have blurred. As a brief example, consider that at one time the dimension nexus of control would yield either a clean centralized translation or a many-to-many web model. Now, however, hybrid, models are technologically possible and pragmatically desirable. The classification of solutions is much fuzzier than 15 years ago when the same problems were addressed as “distributed artificial intelligence” or as “office information systems”. In this overview of the special issue we first discuss both the traditional approaches and the new and very interesting hybrid models seen in many of the papers in this issue through a framework with three dimensions. We then briefly review each of the special issue papers with reference to the framework in the hope of making the context, applicability and assumptions of each more quickly evident.