Issues in peer-to-peer electronic services (Extended abstract)

The wide diffusion of ICTs has unchained subsequent waves of expectations about how the new ways of communicating and ex- changing information and knowledge would affect inter-firm relation- ships, hopefully improving their performance. However, facts often down- sized expectations. Even the so called Web revolution did not solve above mentioned issues. In fact the adoption of Internet-based tools by many SMEs have still limited to the Internet access, e-mail and static company Web sites only. Today the new frontier is the adoption of peer-to-peer approach and semantic-based technologies such as semantic Web ser- vices and ontologies. However, a crucial node for the future development of peer-to-peer semantic networks is understanding if, and eventually how, software architectures based on those concepts can create economic value for all network members. This paper presents relevant issues in the provisioning of electronic services in peer-to-peer environments and proposes preliminary solutions under developing in the context of the NeP4B (Network Peers for Business) project

WINK: A web-based system for collaborative project management in virtual enterprises

The increasing of globalization and flexibility required to the companies has generated, in the last decade, new issues, related to the managing of large scale projects within geographically distributed networks and to the cooperation of enterprises. ICT support systems are required to allow enterprises to share information, guarantee data-consistency and establish synchronized and collaborative processes. In this paper we present a collaborative project management system that integrates data coming from aerospace industries with two main goals: avoiding inconsistencies generated by updates at the sources' level and minimizing data replications. The proposed system is composed of a collaborative project management component supported by a web interface, a multi-agent data integration component, which supports information sharing and querying, and SOAP enabled web-services which ensure the whole interoperability of the software components. The system was developed by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Gruppo Formula S.p.A. and Alenia Spazio S.p.A. within the EU WINK Project (Web-linked Integration of Network based Knowledge - IST-2000-28221)

DOI: 10.1007/s11280-005-2322-7 An Intelligent Data Integration Approach for Collaborative Project Management in Virtual Enterprises

The increasing globalization and flexibility required by companies has generated new issues in the last decade related to the managing of large scale projects and to the cooperation of enterprises within geographically distributed networks. ICT support systems are required to help enterprises share information, guarantee dataconsistency and establish synchronized and collaborative processes. In this paper we present a collaborative project management system that integrates data coming from aerospace industries with a main goal: to facilitate the activity of assembling, integration and the verification of a multienterprise project. The main achievement of the system from a data management perspective is to avoid inconsistencies generated by updates at the sources ’ level and minimizes data replications. The developed system is composed of a collaborative project management component supported by a web interface, a multi-agent data integration system, which supports information sharing and querying, and web-services that ensure the interoperability of the software components. The system was developed by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Gruppo Formula S.p.A. and tested by Alenia Spazio S.p.A. within the EU WINK Project (Web-linked Integration of Network based Knowledge