| The Internet is the most important digital phenomenon yet, but we are just beginning to understand the human and social dimensions that drive it. The European Union (EU) Framework Program 6 (FP6) with its Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) Project and other Web Science Research Initiatives have established the foundation of a digital, de-centralized and interdisciplinary environment for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Europe. The DBE Project, which started in 2002, is constantly maturing and has strong potential to be applied on a global scale.;There are several questions concerning SMEs services' orchestration over DBE, such as (1) SMEs challenges to accomplish service orchestration in such an environment, and (2) How can Web 2.0 be leveraged as a collaborative and social network medium for digital business negotiation? It should be noted that Web2.0 has been successfully implemented in Wikipedia and other online social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, and others. However, Web 2.0 concepts are not widely accepted yet in business applications, especially to support collaboration.;Complementing Web 2.0, DBE and supporting open source tools, present a promising approach to empower SMEs to digitally collaborate in a Digital Ecosystem. This dissertation presents a maturity model which describes services' interoperability, added to the mechanisms of collaboration and knowledge capital generation.;The proposition for the research was: "DBE Services' orchestration capabilities may be improved by using a Web 2.0 Collaboration Environment (CoE)".;The literature review showed that Web 2.0 is still in its infancy. Yet, it demonstrated its capabilities in today's online social networks. It was found that SMEs must change their structures dramatically to be able to participate in a self-organizing system. With limited budgets and resources, SMEs need to establish a democratic structure, based on a habitat of democratic groups. These facts stimulated the research questions. The demonstration of the proposed solution was done by means of a prototype. The demonstration suggests that the proposed solution has a high usefulness and can be adopted easily by participating SMEs. The contribution of this the research is the provision of services, an SME interoperability maturity model, a Digital Business Ecosystem Collaboration Environment, and visual representation of SME associations. Keywords: Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE), Web 2.0, Democratic group structure, Ontology Interoperability, Collaboration Environment (CoE), Self-Organizing Systems. |
