Leveraging peer-to-peer and ontologies for the extended enterprise

In recent years, organisations are blurring their boundaries interacting with other organisations. This process fostered new business paradigms and organisational forms that transcend the previous static and closed competitive models and move to flexible and collaborative ways of working. Examples of new models are the extended enterprise (EE) and virtual enterprise (VE). For promoting those new organisational models are required adequate technologies enabling collaboration, integration and exchanging of information across heterogeneous and distributed sources. Moreover, in such environments, another important aspect to deal with is related to the 'quality' of information and knowledge exchanged. For fulfilling those requirements, we argue that a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture implementing the 'virtual office' paradigm combined with adequate semantic supports can be an effective solution. This paper presents K-link+, a P2P system implemented in JXTA based on the concepts of 'community of business', 'virtual office' and 'ontologies'. © 2008 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.