Abstract
As markets become unexpectedly turbulent with a shortened product life cycle and a power shift towards buyers, the need for methods to rapidly and cost-effectively develop products, production facilities and supporting software is becoming urgent. The use of a virtual enterprise plays a vital role in surviving turbulent markets. However, its success requires reliable and large-scale interoperation among trading partners via a semantic web of trading partners' services whose properties, capabilities, and interfaces are encoded in an unambiguous as well as computer-understandable form. This paper demonstrates a promising approach to integration and interoperation between a design house and a manufacturer by developing semantic web services for business and engineering transactions. To this end, detailed activity and information flow diagrams are developed, in which the two trading partners exchange messages and documents. The properties and capabilities of the manufacturer sites are defined using DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) ontology definition language. The prototype development of semantic webs shows that enterprises can widely interoperate in an unambiguous and autonomous manner; hence, virtual enterprise is realizable at a low cost.