Socially-based brokerage and composition in virtual communities

Daniel Schall

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2013, vol. 12, issue 3, 251-281

Abstract: Collaborations in a global environment have become a defacto requirement for most large organisations. Alliances are formed among organisations to exploit joint capabilities for the purpose of creating novel products or services. From a technical point of view, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and standard languages for service composition offer well-established techniques for cross-organisational collaboration. Each collaboration typically involves interactions among people and software services. However, rigid top-down workflow technologies cannot account for the dynamic nature of interactions and collaborations. Here, we propose novel socially-based models for the composition of professional virtual communities (PVC). We focus on the notion of brokers who act as intermediaries between segregated communities. We introduce a broker discovery and ranking approach utilising a link-based broker importance model. We evaluate our approach through a service-oriented testbed and real community data obtained from EU ICT FP7 research collaborations.

Keywords: virtual organisations; structural holes; brokers; social computing; human provided services; social network analysis; SNA; virtual communities; online communities; web based communities; service-oriented architecture; SOA; collaboration; broker discovery; broker ranking. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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