Social Formation and Interactions in Evolving Service-Oriented Communities

The global scale and distribution of companies have changed the economy and dynamics of businesses. Web-based collaborations and cross-organizational processes typically require dynamic and context-based interactions between people and services. However, finding the right partner to work on joint tasks or to solve emerging problems in such scenarios is challenging due to scale (number of involved people and services) and the temporary nature of collaborations. Furthermore, actor skills and competencies evolve over time requiring dynamic approaches for the management of actor properties. Web services and SOA are the ideal technical framework to automate interactions spanning people and services. In this paper, we present a novel discovery mechanism based on social trust to support formation and dynamic interactions in service-oriented collaboration networks. We argue that trust between members is essential for successful collaborations. Here we discuss profile similarity-based link establishment to connect disparate network segments.