Socially-based brokerage and composition in virtual communities

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.