Chapter 5 - A technological infrastructure to sustain Internetworked Enterprises

In the Web 3.0 scenario, where information and services are connected by means of their semantics, organizations can improve their competitive advan- tage by publishing their business and service descriptions. In this scenario, Seman- tic Peer to Peer (P2P) can play a key role in defining dynamic and highly reconfi- gurable infrastructures. Organizations can share knowledge and services, using this infrastructure to move towards value networks, an emerging organizational model characterized by fluid boundaries and complex relationships. This chapter collects and defines the technological requirements and architecture of a modular and multi-Layer Peer to Peer infrastructure for SOA-based applications. This technological infrastructure, based on the combination of Semantic Web and P2P technologies, is intended to sustain Internetworked Enterprise configurations, de- fining a distributed registry and enabling more expressive queries and efficient routing mechanisms. The following sections focus on the overall architecture, while describing the layers that form it.