Smart Supply Web: An Application of Web-Based Data and Workflow Mediation

This paper describes our vision of a Supply Web as the next major advance in the e-commerce world in terms of how e-services are delivered. After highlighting shortcomings of existing supply chain solutions, we give an architecture to show how three important technologies, namely, workflow systems, data integration and on-line decision support, will have to come together to enable seamless deployment of e-service supply web solutions. We first discuss research efforts (namely, XRL, YATL and DecisionFlows) that support the three technologies separately, and then describe the challenges of integrating them effectively.