A Knowledge Management Platform for Supporting Digital Business Ecosystems based on P2P and SOA technologies

We consider a digital business ecosystem environment where SMEs cooperate and compete. We aim to provide to each SME and the ecosystem with knowledge management mechanisms to support their needs for information, service findings and recommendations. We present the design and implementation of a platform that supports the knowledge management needs in this environment. We describe the business related knowledge managed by the knowledge base (KB), as well as the architectural components and the core services supported by the KB infrastructure. Since the SMEs are independent and their KB contents are evolving we adopted a P2P framework for the cooperation of SMEs. We present the P2P framework and we outline the knowledge discovery and replication mechanisms supported by the implementation. The knowledge management mechanisms described in this paper form the infrastructure for knowledge management of the Digital Business Ecosystem IP project of EU.