Service Communities: A Structuring Mechanism for Service-Oriented Business Ecosystems

As service-oriented computing technologies mature and gain acceptance, the focus of the research community shifts toward applications, business concerns, and business value creation. Service-oriented business ecosystems are one such emerging research area. In our previous work, we argued for a structuring mechanism enabling service communities in business ecosystems - dynamic, customizable groups of services provided and used by membership-based social or business networks of varying scale and lifetime. This paper develops the idea of service communities further in three ways. First, we study a variety of motivating business scenarios and articulate the business value of applying the community concept to services. Second, we provide technical details of our middleware platform that supports the runtime creation and management of service communities. Third, we discuss extensions of the general service community idea for further value creation and research.