Bridging socially-enhanced virtual communities

Abstract

Interactions spanning multiple organizations have become an important aspect in today´s collaboration landscape. Organizations create alliances to fulfill strategic objectives. The dynamic nature of collaborations increasingly demands for automated techniques and algorithms to support the creation of such alliances. Our approach bases on the recommendation of potential alliances by discovery of currently relevant competence sources and the support of semi-automatic formation. The environment is service-oriented comprising humans and software services with distinct capabilities. To mediate between previously separated groups and organizations, we introduce the broker concept that bridges disconnected networks. We present a dynamic broker discovery approach based on interaction mining techniques and trust metrics. We evaluate our approach by using simulations in real Web services´ testbeds.