Abstract
An electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) is a promising architectural model to develop collaborative supply chain management and integration platforms (Premkumar, 2003). The e-marketplace philosophy is based on a collection of economically motivated companies that need to cooperate with each other by exchanging data, resources, and competences. To this aim, competitive technical and economical solutions have been found by integrating resources from diverse organizations into a virtual enterprise (VE) (Travica, 2005), enabling groups of companies to jointly develop and commercialise products and services, which an individual participating company could not realise by itself due to limited technical and financial capabilities.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Grid Computing: Computing paradigm that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources.
E-Services: Software paradigm enabling peer-to-peer computation in distributed environments based on the concept of “service” as an autonomous piece of code published in the network.
E-marketplace: Internet-based electronic market that allows online business-to-business communications and transactions.
Virtual Enterprise: A new form of economic undertaking where several actors associate their strengths to provide specific products and services traditionally provided by a single enterprise.
Micro-Array: Technology providing biologists with the ability to measure the expression levels of thousands of genes in a single experiment.
Workflow: The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant (human or machine) to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.
Bio-Informatics: The application of information technology to advanced biological problems, like transcriptomics and proteomics, involving huge amounts of data.
E-Science: Modality of performing scientific research through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet, using very large data collections and high performance computing resources.