Adaptable Information Provisioning in Collaborative Networks: An Object Modeling Framework and System Approach

Well-informed network participants are a necessity for successful collaboration in business networks. The widespread knowledge of the many aspects of the network is an effective vehicle to promote trust within the network, successfully resolve conflicts, and build a prospering collaboration climate. Despite their natural interest in being well informed about all the different aspects of the network, limited resources, e.g. time restrictions of the participants, often prevents reaching an appropriate level of shared information. It is possible to overcome this problem through the use of an active information provisioning service that allows users to adapt the provisioning of information to their specific needs. This paper presents an extensible information modeling framework and also additional complementary concepts that are designed to enable such an active provisioning service. Furthermore, a high-level architecture for a system that offers the targeted information provisioning service is described.