An Ontology for Match-Making in Plug and Play Business Software Platform

Abstract: An innovation is the process of making improvements by introducing new idea in the form of product or service. In recent years, successful societies are shifting their focus towards the realization and acceptance of these new ideas. Plug and Play business software platform is the first step to transform these ideas into reality. The study presented in this thesis introduced that a new business idea contains specific business role and consists of a set of capabilities or needs and any one of them. Plug and play business software platform mainly consists of three major business processes that are required to run this platform those are; business match making process, negotiating process and collaboration process. This study analyzes the process of business match making in detail and introduce an ontology based business match making process which will find new businesses in a hierarchical fashion based on their specific business roles. Match making ontology consists of three processes i.e. information collection process which is used to collect and register information, extraction process which is an optional process to extract set of capabilities and needs if actor/innovator is unable to define its business capabilities and needs in information collection process and finally finding and ranking process which will find a set of potential collaborators and then will rank that set based on ranking parameters collected in information collection process from actor/innovator. This study also presents a technological model which will provide foundation to develop plug and play business software platform. This model identifies business processes of the platform and presents each business process as a separate loosely coupled software module. This model divides the platform into two layers; the upper layer is called PnP layer and consists of PnP Client Service, PnP Community Service, Finding and Ranking Service, Negotiating Service and Collaboration Service; lower layer is called kernel layer and consists of Security management Service, Operational management Services and Communication Service. Finally partially implemented prototype, test data and results will be used to visualize the presented concept.