A Design Blueprint for Virtual Organizations in a Service Oriented Landscape

TL;DR

This paper proposes a standardized design blueprint for building Virtual Organizations within a Service-Oriented Architecture, emphasizing requirement analysis and a reference architecture to support diverse technological paradigms.

Contribution

It introduces a two-phase standardization process including requirement analysis and a reference architecture for Virtual Organizations, accommodating paradigm shifts and technological diversity.

Findings

Developed a requirement analysis pattern for VO components

Created a generic framework based on Everything-as-a-Service

Proposed a two-phase standardization process

Abstract

"United we stand, divided we fall" is a well known saying. We are living in the era of virtual collaborations. Advancement on conceptual and technological level has enhanced the way people communicate. Everything-as-a-Service once a dream, now becoming a reality. Problem nature has also been changed over the time. Today, e-Collaborations are applied to all the domains possible. Extensive data and computing resources are in need and assistance from human experts is also becoming essential. This puts a great responsibility on Information Technology (IT) researchers and developers to provide generic platforms where user can easily communicate and solve their problems. To realize this concept, distributed computing has offered many paradigms, e.g. cluster, grid, cloud computing. Virtual Organization (VO) is a logical orchestration of globally dispersed resources to achieve common goals. Existing paradigms and technology are used to form Virtual Organization, but lack of standards remained a critical issue for last two decades. Our research endeavor focuses on developing a design blueprint for Virtual Organization building process. The proposed standardization process is a two phase activity. First phase provides requirement analysis and the second phase presents a Reference Architecture for Virtual Organization (RAVO). This form of standardization is chosen to accommodate both technological and paradigm shift. We categorize our efforts in two parts. First part consists of a pattern to identify the requirements and components of a Virtual Organization. Second part details a generic framework based on the concept of Everything-as-a-Service.