Service-based Networked Collaboration

Collaboration in distributed systems have experienced more and more interest over the time. Traditional distributed systems are featured by resource sharing among a fixed/limited number of different partners, with a-priori knowledge about each other, mainly obtained through mediator-based architectures. Recently, the collaboration paradigm evolved towards collaborative P2P distributed systems, with an increased number of enterprises, acting as peers on the network, looking for possible partners that can provide relevant knowledge in a given domain, without a-priori knowledge about each other. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework for networked collaboration in P2P environments based on service sharing and discovery. In particular, we consider two meaningful scenarios in which peers search for other peers providing similar or additional functionalities and discuss a framework that supports these scenarios.