A Framework for Managing Services in a Virtual Community Context

Virtual Communities (VCs) are dominating our daily activities from different insights. Social, Business, Professional, Educational and many VCs are competing to conquer the cloud by targeting more audience through the services they provide. The diversity, magnitude and quality of provided services raise a new challenge for managing these services. Consequently, the success or failure of VCs depends to a great extent on the robustness and dynamicity of managing their services. The concepts of decoupling and dynamic allocation of services found in SOA encourage us to adopt this architecture to develop a framework to manage services provided inside VCs. The core of this framework is a service mediation system in charge of providing, monitoring and maintaining services inside VCs. The objective of this work is to make sure community members are getting the services they need with the quality they request at the time they want within the VC they belong to. We intend to have this work generic enough to be adapted to different service oriented disciplines.