21-07-2012, 10:53 AM
Bridging Socially-Enhanced Virtual Communities
Bridging Socially-Enhanced Virtual Communities.pdf (Size: 1.11 MB / Downloads: 29)
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.
INTRODUCTION
The rapid advancement of ICT-enabled infrastructure has
fundamentally changed how businesses and companies operate.
Global markets and the requirement for rapid innovation
demand for alliances between individual companies [5].
Web services and service-oriented computing offer well established
standards and techniques to model
BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK
In service-oriented environments, standards have been established
to model human-based process activities and tasks
(WS-HumanTask [7]). However, these standards demand for
the precise definition of interaction models between humans
and services. In our approach, we combine SOA concepts
and social principles. We consider open service-oriented
environments wherein services can be added at any point
in time. Following the open world assumption, humans actively
shape the availability of services. We adopt the concept
of Human-Provided Services (HPS) [20] to support flexible
service-oriented collaborations across multiple organizations
and domains. Similarly, emergent collectives as defined
by [17] are networks of interlinked valued nodes (services).
Collaboration Scenario
Let us discuss an actual collaboration scenario in PVCs
as depicted in Figure 1. Various member groups collaborate
in the context of five different activities a1, a2, a3, a4
and a5 (see Figure 1(a)). These groups intersect since members
may participate in different activities at the same time.
The color of the activity context determines the expertise
areas an activity is related to. Such activities are, for instance,
the creation of new specifications or the discussion
of future technology standards. Activities (e.g., see [15]) are
a concept to structure information in flexible collaboration
environments, including the goal of ongoing tasks, involved
actors, and utilized resources such as documents or services.
Emergence and Evolution of Trust
In contrast to a widely used security perspective on trust,
we define social trust relying on the interpretation of previous
collaboration behavior and also considering the similarity
of dynamically changing interests [8, 21]. Especially
in collaborative environments where users are exposed to
higher risks as compared to common social network scenarios
[6] and business is at stake, considering social trust is essential
to effectively guide interactions [14]. Here, we define
trust as follows [9, 16, 21]: Trust reflects the expectation one
actor has about another’s future behavior to perform given
activities dependably, securely, and reliably based on experiences
collected from previous interactions.
Broker Behavior Patterns
Brokers differ from other actors by their mediation capabilities.
A broker acts as an intermediary node between two
previously separated communities or collaboration teams.
Thus, it is essential that it monitors frequently demanded
contacts, updates and maintains its relations to increase
and strengthen its popularity, and consequently, trust. If
demand decreases, the broker must find and establish new
relations. The discussed way to solve the problem is to provide
the possibility of querying the social network for new
contacts of interest. Of interest are, e.g., contacts to communities
with high trust relations among the members and
a distinct expertise.