Issues in Peer-to-Peer Electronic Services

The wide diffusion of ICTs has unchained subsequent waves of expectations about how the new ways of communicating and ex- changing information and knowledge would affect inter-firm relation- ships, hopefully improving their performance. However, facts often down- sized expectations. Even the so called Web revolution did not solve above mentioned issues. In fact the adoption of Internet-based tools by many SMEs have still limited to the Internet access, e-mail and static company Web sites only. Today the new frontier is the adoption of peer-to-peer approach and semantic-based technologies such as semantic Web ser- vices and ontologies. However, a crucial node for the future development of peer-to-peer semantic networks is understanding if, and eventually how, software architectures based on those concepts can create economic value for all network members. This paper presents relevant issues in the provisioning of electronic services in peer-to-peer environments and proposes preliminary solutions under developing in the context of the NeP4B (Network Peers for Business) project