Dominant trends in distributed systems are increasing network connectivity, business-to-business integration and an evolution from desktop-oriented software to service-oriented software. The size and complexity of networked services has furthermore broadened from intra-organization to cross-organizational service provisioning. In the last decade many coordination architectures have been proposed to coordinate the provisioning of services across organizational boundaries. These approaches involve various types of service contracts and policies, and various coordination activities including negotiation, validation, enactment, monitoring and enforcement of service policies and contracts. In this paper, we propose a reference model for such coordination architectures in order to support the following goals: (i) to facilitate the analysis, comparison and discussion of different coordination architectures and (ii) to allow for constructive proposals about improving the existing coordination architectures.
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