Goods for sale: create service with just one click

Type of paper: Case study Purpose Given the complexity of the overall scenario in our globalized world, day after day it becomes more evident that the key of success resides in discovering interactions. Using a biochemical analogy, we can compare markets with the primordial soup where molecules fights to survive. Some ones actively interacted to evolve in more competitive organism, some others passively stay at the window and are doomed to be swept away. Following this analogy, we believe that Semantic Web technology, also called Web 2.0, can play the role of activating enzymes and we will discuss such a view by analyzing the case of a virtual network of heterogeneous Italian firms, which conduct a market service-centred behaviour implemented through a web based service system. Design/methodology/approach In the framework of a nationally funded research project called ABACO, firms in the Campania Region belonging to tourism, cultural heritage and food industry have been identified, and their use of Internet services, was assessed. We noticed that, even though each homogeneous group of firms may be considered a local network, these organizations lack of horizontal integration fostering a single value co-creation network built around tourism attraction forces. While it was not possible in the past, nowadays Semantic Web technology can be viewed as a smart automatic “activator” of services keeping its fuelling from both the availability of goods and the use of sophisticated knowledge mining tools. We are experimenting that this could be accomplished through an integrated ICT service system based on a network configuration for the co-creation of value, where co-exist both suppliers and consumers of services in order to create a virtual network of three areas. It is a semantic web-based service oriented architecture, in order to allow interoperability, where each product can be considered as a service. Each firm can easily participate to the virtual network by uploading its goods descriptions into the system database, which are then used by the system to create related services. A customer of this system can be a real person who is interested in buying services or a firm‟s owner who is interested in either selling or buying goods as services. But the power of the system is to strengthen every actor capacity to co-design, co-produce and hence co-create value within the system, enabling the SD Logic issues with ICT solution based on semantic web models. Implications and Practical inferences For entrepreneurs to better design their communication and interaction systems and to realize more effective business relations. For researchers to better understand the ICT solutions enabling value cocreation in a real time participating process. Findings It is found that semantic web based architectures can easily allow firms to participate to a market place driven by service dominant logic. Heterogeneous firms can be integrated in a virtual network where the dominant logic for creation of value is the service exchange. Each firm can easily participate to the network by using a web-based application: services can be created with just one click. Originality/value Semantic Web service oriented architecture can be used for creating virtual networks of firms where the co-creation of value can be obtained by following the service dominant logic. Keywords Viable System Approach, Service System, network, interoperability, World Wide Web, service oriented architecture.