A Top-Down Methodology for Building Semantic-Rich Service-Oriented Collaborative Virtual Enterprise (CVE)

Collaborative virtual enterprise (CVE) is a new paradigm for industry and it imposes significant challenges on effective operation. In this paper, we formalized a top-down methodology for designing and developing service-oriented CVE with rich semantic support. This methodology facilitates automatic execution of virtual business process via service composition. The semantic notion is emphasized as semantic Web services technologies (i.e. OWL-S) have become an integrated and essential part of our top-down methodology. The methodology has been applied to manufacturing sector for a virtual enterprise which has the business proposition of effective and efficient business process. To our knowledge, this is among the first attempts to use semantic Web and Web services technologies in such a scale and sophistication.