A structured marketplace for arbitrary services

Creating simple marketplaces with common rules, that enable the dynamic selection and consumption of functionality, is the missing link to allow small businesses to enter the cloud, not only as consumers, but also as vendors. In this paper, we present the concepts behind a hybrid service and process repository that can act as the foundation for such a marketplace, as well as a prototype that allowed us to test various real-world scenarios. The advantage of a hybrid service and process repository is that, it not only holds a flat list of services, but also exposes a generic set of use cases, that it obtains information on how specific services can be used to implement the use cases as well as information to select services at run-time according to customer's goal functions. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.