Project Goals
The project’s main goals can be summarized on two levels: organisational objectives and realizing certain scientific and technological objectives.
Organisational objectives
The organisational objectives of the project are to allow for the secure and fast set-up and management of the networked enterprises through short-term and project-based business alliances with the following goals:
- Enable outsourcing of parts of the value chain to business partners (and vice versa, offering such parts in form of services) in short-term business alliances
- Simplify collaboration between members of participating organisations through both dynamically created and pre-defined business processes and workflows
- Achieve interoperability and integration between heterogeneous organisations of all sizes
- Offer generic solutions for inter-enterprise interoperability and collaboration through reference scenarios and guidelines for their use.
With respect to the needs of SMEs in particular, SPIKE will put an emphasis on pragmatism and financial feasibility of the developed solutions by building upon existing open source solutions. This will increase the chances for successful exploitation of the project’s results.
Scientifical and technologiy objectives
The science and technology objectives of the SPIKE project include the research, development, implementation and validation of the following components:
- Semantic service bus for registering, discovering and contracting services, as well as service message routing and processing capabilities
- Semantic business process management engine, which will handle customized reference processes, ad-hoc defined workflows and distributed processes built from generic process fragments
- Semantic transformation of service messages including user context information
- Information flow control between members of the alliance, that is, service message and user context filtering according to previously specified policies
- Security infrastructure for the networked enterprise in terms of attribute management, authentication, workflow and service access control, and auditing functionality
- Repositories for processes and ontologies supporting the networked enterprise
- Portal server extension for semantic context capturing and communication
- Portal-based interfaces and tools for user-friendly administration of alliances, ad-hoc workflow modelling and process handling, service management and security as well as user administration
To increase the project impact and to facilitate the deployment process, the technical objectives will be complemented with the development of a methodological guideline on how to operate, run and dissolve a business alliance in general, and especially with the SPIKE system.
