A manageable web services hub framework and enabling technologies for e-sourcing

In this paper, a manageable Web services hub framework and enabling technologies for e-sourcing are proposed for buyers, suppliers, service providers and trading partners to register business, user and service information as well as to provision and subscribe to services. The proposed framework enables a business to dynamically configure its business processes to integrate with existing Web services provided by other enterprises based on service requirements. Next, a multi-level security mechanism ensuring secure communications in a hub or among hubs is presented. An advanced Web services discovery mechanism is introduced after that for looking up multiple UDDI registries and aggregating results in an efficient manner. A working system of this framework, Managed e-Hub, which provides an infrastructure for enabling next generation e-utilities in a secure and controlled environment, is also presented in this paper. Some further research ideas are given at the end of the paper.