Infrastructure support for smart organisations: Integrations of web service partners in heterogenous environments

In a rapidly changing world, continuous adoption of new practices is crucial for survival; organizations embracing the latest technologies have a competitive edge. Smart organizations readily take on board new organizational forms and practices, those in particular that offer agility and responsiveness. The Internet and World Wide Web offer a new way of collaboration via Web services, but heterogeneity of different service components make cooperation difficult. This chapter describes a new approach to combine Web services by employing a layered structure, in which composition of a value-added service can be built from individual components, and each service component can have semantically equivalent but syntactically different alternatives.