A Hub Architecture for Service Ecosystems - Towards Business-to-Business Automation with an Ontology-enabled Collaboration Platform

The management and coordination of business process collaboration experiences changes because of globalization, specialization, and innovation. Service-oriented computing (SOC) is a means towards businessprocess automation and recently, many industry standards emerged to become part of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) stack. In a globalized world, organizations face new challenges for setting up and carrying out collaborations in semi-automating ecosystems for business services. A need emerges for service Hubs that not only store service offers and requests together with their issuing organizations and assigned owners, but that also allow an evaluation of trust and reputation in an anonymized electronic service marketplace. In this paper, we explore the features of a semi-automating ecosystem in which business processes are expressed as services and where Hubs are essential for bringing together service offers and requests. The presented Hub architecture is designed so that business managers benefit from an interface that borrows concepts of socialnetworking sites while the complex computing machinery for matching service offers and requests remains hidden from the user. The partial implementation of service-Hub components demonstrate the feasibility of