A Framework For Classifying and Comparing Web Services Procurement Platforms

The procurement of web services (WSP) shifts the focus of architects and integrators from functional to quality-ofservice (QoS) aspects. A number of platforms have been proposed as supporting infrastructures to assist WSP activities. Notwithstanding, there is a lack of consensus on (i) what expressiveness degree in QoS specifications should be offered, and (ii) what activities should be supported by these platforms. This paper attempts to provide an answer to both questions, thus it motivates and presents a classification framework for WSP platforms. This framework is used to compare several existing platforms and to identify some key properties and deficiencies, which might be considered as a research agenda for the future.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2000-1106-C02-01Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC 2003-02737-C02-01Junta de Comunidades de Castilla La Mancha PCB-02-00

A New Business Model For Electronic Marketplaces

The use of electronic marketplaces contrary to expectations still remains marginal in the ‘Francophone’ business landscape. Despite convincing arguments discussed in the scholarly, professional and trade literature, the credibility of marketplaces is constantly undermined in practice as they have to incessantly fend off rumours about bankruptcy in France and elsewhere. Moreover, the term ‘marketplace’ can cover a multitude of business relationships and it is currently difficult to compare offers and distinguish across a range of services. The purpose of this paper is therefore to put forward a typology by identifying, analysing and classifying the Francophone marketplaces, i.e. 225 marketplaces, in the fall of 2007. The proposed typology enables us to (1) highlight their diversity and the types of economic models that underpin their value chain (2) observe that the majority neglects certain high-added value services for which demand is great, and favours services which are hardly cost-effective and for which supply is much higher than demand, and (3) anticipate future evolutions by examining the strategic moves that a minority of them are already making

Data Quality Barriers for Transparency in Public Procurement

Governments need to be accountable and transparent for their public spending decisions in order to prevent losses through fraud and corruption as well as to build healthy and sustainable economies. Open data act as a major instrument in this respect by enabling public administrations, service providers, data journalists, transparency activists, and regular citizens to identify fraud or uncompetitive markets through connecting related, heterogeneous, and originally unconnected data sources. To this end, in this article, we present our experience in the case of Slovenia, where we successfully applied a number of anomaly detection techniques over a set of open disparate data sets integrated into a Knowledge Graph, including procurement, company, and spending data, through a linked data-based platform called TheyBuyForYou. We then report a set of guidelines for publishing high quality procurement data for better procurement analytics, since our experience has shown us that there are significant shortcomings in the quality of data being published. This article contributes to enhanced policy making by guiding public administrations at local, regional, and national levels on how to improve the way they publish and use procurement-related data; developing technologies and solutions that buyers in the public and private sectors can use and adapt to become more transparent, make markets more competitive, and reduce waste and fraud; and providing a Knowledge Graph, which is a data resource that is designed to facilitate integration across multiple data silos by showing how it adds context and domain knowledge to machine-learning-based procurement analytics.publishedVersio

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

A Framework for understanding & classifying Urban Data Business Models

Governments’ objective to transition to ‘Smart Cities’ heralds new possibilities for urban data business models to address pressing city challenges and digital transformation imperatives. Urban data business models are not well understood due to such factors as the maturity of the market and limited available research within this domain. Understanding the barriers and challenges in urban data business model development as well as the types of opportunities in the ecosystem is essential for incumbents and new entrants. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to develop a framework for understanding and classifying Urban Data Business Models (UDBM). This paper uses an embedded case study method to derive the framework by analyzing 40 publicly funded and supported business model experiments that address pressing city challenges under one initiative. This research contributes to the scholarly discourse on business model innovation in the context of smart cities

Analysis of Current Supplier Relationship Management Practices: A Solution Proposal

The work contributes with the existing literature by investigating current SRM practices. Based on the research, the author has designed an information system framework, which provides companies with an innovative SRM solution to manage their indirect material purchasing process through an environment that supports companies entire plan-to-order activities, including functionalities such as central data management, spend data management, e-sourcing and the usual e-procurement features