Contents 1. Introduction
A dynamic virtual enterprise (VE) can be viewed as a temporary alliance between various partners and services to support a certain activity or set of activities [15]. These activities often take the form of VE processes which are collaborative in nature and require consideration of cross organizational issues such as reliability, trust and service management. In this paper we look into possible ways to support web-based collaboration between organizations within a dynamic real-time VE. The web is increasingly being used by e-businesses for collaboration, integration and hosting of services. XML has developed into a de-facto data exchange format for the web and led to the development of web service standards which are becoming widely accepted in e-commerce [33]. In our approach we therefore focus on a service oriented view of collaboration that is compatible with emerging web service standards [25] based on XML, SOAP, and WSDL. We describe a web based collaboration system which could support small to medium businesses that wish to collaborate in a VE through the sharing of services available on their respective online systems. We argue that to support this type of VE a third party collaboration point is an ideal choice and can be used to provide automated support to facilitate the dynamic creation and execution of VE processes. The concept of a shared private tuplespace (dataspace) is introduced as an indirect communications mechanism to support interaction, coordination and data management between VE partners. We also show how teams of agents using multi-agent system (MAS) technology and specialized tuples can be used to realize many of the desired categories of automated support.
