A methodological approach to enable cooperative process design through Web Services

Abstract Web services are rapidly becoming the key technology for enterprises to enable IT development and modernization. By now, organizations have experi-enced the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology by developing and us-ing simple internal applications or by searching for information provided by ex-ternal services, thus enabling the interactions among different organizations. SOA is also an appropriate platform-independent approach to implement cooperative business processes. In this scenario, the service is a unit of work provided by a service provider and offered to the other organizations involved in a common net-work. In order to share services and knowledge, organizations have to standardize their own process descriptions and model them through services using the same approach and principles. The paper proposes a methodology to support the de-signer in the identification of services to produce by considering the initial process flow. The adoption of the presented approach would guarantee a homogenous de-scription of services and their interaction along the enterprise network and thus fa-cilitate the collaboration