A service oriented architecture framework for collaborative services

The demand for flexible, efficient and user-friendly collaborative services is becoming more and more urgent as the competition in the current market-oriented arena is getting more intense and fiercer. Enterprises have to be more dynamic in terms of collaboration with partners and even competitors. The service oriented architecture is a promising distributed computing paradigm offering solutions that are extendible, flexible and compatible with legacy systems. This paper proposes and investigates the use of SOA in the construction of collaborative services. The paper starts with a short introduction of the service oriented architecture and then gives a description of collaborative services. A generic model of a collaborative service is analysed to identify the basic collaborative functions. A service oriented architecture framework for collaborative service is presented.