Web services for public-private innovation
networks
Valentina Nejkovic*, Milan Gocic**
*
**
University of Nis, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Nis, Serbia
University of Nis, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Nis, Serbia
valentina.nejkovic@elfak.ni.ac.rs, milan.gocic@gaf.ni.ac.rs
Abstract—Intensive
socio-economic changes and
development of new complex information and
communication
technologies
have
led
to
organizational and structural changes. Without
having global connections for knowledge and
information sharing current sustainability of
innovation processes is reduced. Thus, these changes
in movements of enterprises’ boundaries to access
different expertise and technological fields are
required. In this paper, we present our view of today
public private innovation network conceptual
framework based on Web services.
I.
INTRODUCTION
In order to stay competitive, commercial enterprises
involve new information and communication technologies
into their operations. Integration of new technologies is
seen as a way to boost efficiency and productivity of
enterprises. The fact about new technology integration is
evident since successful innovators spend a significant
amount of their budget on implementation processes of
modern information technologies [1]. Appliances of Web
services are in expansion primarily in the field of financial
sector. Today we can find electronic services for ebanking, bill pay and brokerage.
Further, since costs and demands for public services
have been increased and public budgets in many
developed countries are not sufficient for such demands,
new solutions have to be found. Establishment of publicprivate partnership (PPP) is seen as a possible solution
where public and private organizations collaborate. In
such organization, private organization access to resources
of public organizations and make new profits, while from
the other side public organizations have opportunity to
exploit experience and flexibility of private organizations
and to transfer their risks. Today, a major number of
governments use PPP to deliver infrastructure and
essential basic services. It can improve availability,
quality, innovation and prices of the public services [2].
The success of the PPP is seen when the value of money is
achieved [3, 4].
Within public-private cooperation the both sides have
common interest and can benefit from such cooperation
[5]. This cooperation is a well-known form of cooperation
mobilizing in order to produce technological innovations
in industry sector. Thus, public-private innovation
networks (PPIN) raised up to achieve more efficient and
effective management in public services provision. PPIN
goes forward with nowadays trend known as “bring your
own cloud” [6], which allows employees to use cloud
services or Web services of their choice in the workplace.
For this purposes, it is necessary to develop Web
services/applications through generating a very large
number of small and innovative services that support webbased and service-oriented approaches of the software.
PPIN should be supported by corresponding web-based
systems. Key feature of such systems are information
retrieving based on users needs followed further with
features such as interactivity and personalization [1]. Such
interactivity and personalization send back top-down and
centralized models of networked policy-making, and bring
forward new trends addressed to bottom-up models. The
new policy network approaches view network as nonhierarchical and inter-dependent relationships of actors
who share common interests and whose cooperation leads
to the best ways of achieving common goals [7, 8].
In this paper, it will be presented a conceptual
framework with the structural elements of the PPINs. In
addition, the description of framework elements
considered as required for efficient innovation process
design is provided.
II. PUBLIC-PRIVATE INNOVATION NETWORKS
The network can be defined as a group of individuals or
organizations (actors) that are interrelated and connected
[9, 10]. It is composed of actors, resources that can be
shared among actors, mechanisms that provide coherence
to the network and activities among actors in network that
include the outcome of network [11].
Networks can be applied very successful for producing
innovations in nowadays environments. By using network
we have an open model for producing innovation on
sustainable way. In such environments accessing external
knowledge and technological resources are key activities.
In this way, innovation networks raised up.
Innovation networks represent social and dynamic
environments where different actors collaborate in order
to produce innovations. Different actors include small and
medium enterprises, universities, innovation centers,
industry associations as well as government agencies [12].
The networks provide resources that present the basis for
the production of technological solutions. Further, interorganizational learning is enabled. Actors in innovation
networks become crucial in today’s knowledge-based
economy. They exchange knowledge, technologies, skills
and competences in order to produce different forms of
innovations. Most of innovation networks involve
complex knowledge, innovation practices and produce a
technological innovation. The part of complex knowledge
and research and development resources could be acquired
through the cooperation of universities, research and
development institutions and centers which are the public
in nature.
Goals of different networks are different. Some
networks exist in order to develop technical solutions to
specific problems and to create new business models and
new products, while the other to empower marginalized
groups by fostering innovations appropriate to their
resources and needs [13]. Every network should follow
certain policy. Key policy issues related to the emergence
and continued success of innovation networks including
their sustainability, social considerations
and the
changing roles of public and private actors in the network
[13].
Public-private
innovation
networks
present
collaboration among public and private actors where
innovation outputs are embodied into technological
artifacts [5]. They are effective for developing technical
and commercial innovations, which include complex
issues, where the problems and the potential solutions that
innovation processes will explore are defined at the
beginning of processes.
III.
using standards such as remote procedure calls (RPC),
CORBA or XML and it is platform independent. For
example, Java can communicate with Perl, as well as
Unix applications can communicate with Windows
applications.
A web service is an example of an service-oriented
architecture with a well-defined set of implementation
choices. The Web services framework has the following
main parts: communication protocols (SOAP or REST),
service descriptions (WSDL) and service discovery or
retrieving what services are available (UDDI) [15].
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST
(Representational State Transfer) are two different
protocols of Web services access. SOAP is a standard that
defines the XML formatted messages between two
applications over IP [16]. It can be used with multiple
transport protocols such as FTP, HTTP or SMTP. While
SOAP provides a framework for the exchange of
information, it lacks the semantics of data transmitted.
SOAP has been used intensively in last decade, while
REST is newer protocol. REST is a simpler alternative to
SOAP, which seeks to fix problems that SOAP had and
provide simple method of accessing Web services.
However, both protocols had to consider when deciding
which protocol to use. SOAP will be more useful in
situation when someone is publishing an API to the
outside world that is either complex or likely to change.
On the contrary, REST is usually the better option and is
used by all Yahoo's web services, Flickr and del.icio.us,
bloglines, technorati, eBay and Amazon, while SOAP is
used by Google.
WSDL (Web Services Description Language) [17]
describes functionalities of Web services using XML
language. It includes a binding mechanism. WSDL
provides an import mechanism of XML Schema, which
can be used for integration of Web services.
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and
Integration) [18] provides a mechanism for customers to
locate Web services by defining a standard way to publish
and discover information about them. Web services are
meaningful only if potential users can find information
sufficient to permit their execution. UDDI can be used to
find Web services of providers which offer different data.
WEB SERVICES
Web services present services that are stored on
different web servers of services’ providers accessible to
users or software via standard protocol [14]. Web services
connect computers and devices using the Internet to
exchange data. Some web services can communicate with
other web services. For that communication it is necessary
software known as middleware which implement
procedures for data exchange and communications.
Technologies based on Web services should extend the
functionality of the Web.
Architecture where are services intensively used is
service-oriented architecture, which represents paradigm
where software components are created with certain
interfaces and composed as a set of functions. Each
component in such architecture provides a service to other
software components. One of the advantages is that there
are no technology requirements with such architecture. A
service can be developed in any programming language
Figure 1. Infrastructure for the usage of Web services (adapted from
[19, 20])
Web services consist of three components: service
broker, service provider and service requester. Fig. 1
illustrates the infrastructure for the usage of Web services
and relationships between the Web service components.
Web services are used primarily as a means for
businesses communications whether for communication
with each others as well as with clients. Web services
allow organizations to communicate data without
knowledge of each other's systems.
Public and private sector can develop websites based on
Web services to provide the availability of publications,
databases and audio and video clips. Fully executable
online services have benefits to the government, citizens
and private sector, while the corporate sites should offered
electronic services.
IV.
PUBLIC-PRIVATE INNOVATION NETWORK
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
We define PPIN framework as a social, complex, open,
interactive process of developing innovations. Figure 2
shows interaction of public and private actors with web
based system that is used as user interface for interactions
with intern system services as well as extern services,
while the stakeholder roles in the PPIN are summarized in
Table I.
TABLE I.
STAKEHOLDER ROLES IN THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE INNOVATION NETWORK
Stakeholder category
Government and local
administration
Universities and research
centers
Small
and
enterprises
medium
Nature of role in the
innovation process
Setting-up of the institutional
framework
Applied
standards
in
defining
public-private
cooperation
Creation and delivery of
innovative products and
services
The system supports different activities within PPIN
and corresponding processes of developing innovations. In
such environment public and private actors interact
dynamically with intensive use of social capital.
Services in this system we define as grouped system
functionalities, which together belong to one service that
are accessible via Internet. Users can access to system
services over Web based system. These services we
named also Web services. Corresponding Web based
systems that can be successfully applied for PPIN are
promising Wiki portals. A Wiki portal is a web based
system where every user is allowed to create new articles
and edit, revise, extend or link existing articles. Since
Wiki popularity grew, many different Wiki software tools
in the market can be found. For example, Wiki Matrix
(http://www.Wikimatrix.com) lists over hundred different
Wiki tools.
Interaction between Wiki portal and extern public Web
services may be based on REST services. The
requirement for such interaction is that Wiki should
support RESTful API [21]. Further, Wiki portal may have
plugins that enable to extend functionality of some
available RIA components (Rich Internet Applications).
RIA affect user interface and interactions and support
online and offline usage, data storage and processing
capabilities directly at the client side, powerful
interaction tools with great usability and personalization.
Using Wiki plugins in the form of RIA components it is
possible to aggregate and mash-up different contents that
are products of public Web services. Using defined
services within proposed framework for PPIN
interactions and communication among actors eider
business-to-business or business-to-clients can be
improved. Actors can bring contents of Web services of
their choice in the Web based virtual work environment.
Intern Web services are divided into basic services,
services for learning, services for knowledge
management, and services for interaction with public
services. Interaction with extern services, such as for
example services offered by YouTube, SlideShare,
Google, etc. can be provided by RIA technologies.
Figure 2. Public-private innovation network conceptual framework
Basic services are responsible for the asynchronous
actor’s communication in PPIN, which include forums
and commenting over contents. Also, the notification
should not be omitted, which ensure actors to be informed
of any changes made over the appropriate contents. We
count users and groups management as basic service,
which performs the function of authentication and
authorization system. Different contents blending by using
web mash-up technology can extend basic services.
Services for learning should provide basic functionality
for creating and using learning resources and
corresponding literature materials. Wiki portal can provide
collaborative development of materials, contents and
documents different extensions. This service should
provide functionality that has social networks web sites
such as interconnection of users, publishing of blogs,
development of personal portfolios and mash-ups of
applications in order to manage multimedia contents.
Services for knowledge management should provide
data storage, data retrieving and knowledge acquisition.
They are a part of the knowledge exchange platform that
enables exchange experiences and ideas. In order to
retrieve data mechanisms for advanced search documents
should be provided. Further, features such as easy
navigation, automatic generation of adjacent links,
dynamic drop-down menus. The concept of collaborative
tagging should provide a collaborative content selforganization, where it is easier to retrieve necessary
information and knowledge.
Services for interaction with public services should
provide external content aggregation and integration of
heterogeneous information. Promising approach that can
be used for content aggregation is web mash-ups of
different internet applications. Generated content
represents a various Web resources involved in different
locations. Applications that can be used are widgets that
are offered for free on the Internet. It is possible to
integrate Youtube videos, SlideShare presentations, and
Flickr images under various system content.
Presented PPIN framework offers interactivity and
personalization of actors, usage of bottom-up model based
on actors needs. That model is agile, adaptable and brings
inter-dependent relationships of actors who share common
interests. Further, this model publishes government data as
an open data in a reusable format. Such open data can
provide a development of new services and different
analyses [22]. In addition, ICT companies will be able to
create new innovative businesses in developing digital
services.
V. CONCLUSION
Efficient public-private interaction processes should
obtain innovation process that leads to outputs composed
of new technological innovations. In this paper, the PPIN
conceptual framework is presented. The proposed PPIN
framework highlights existence of online services that can
lower the cost of service delivery.
Public sector could become more innovative and more
collaborative in decision-making processes, while the
private sector should be more customers oriented and
provide more electronic services.
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