Virtual enterprises (VEs) enable the deployment of distributed business processes among different partners to support shortened development and manufacturing cycles, reduced time to market, increased customer satisfaction and global operation and reach. Dynamic VEs are an emerging category of VEs, where the different partners are selected dynamically during business process execution based on market-driven criteria and negotiation. In this paper, we discuss concepts and technologies that are considered to satisfy key requirements of dynamic virtual enterprises, and propose DIVE (Dynamic Intelligent Virtual Enterprises), a framework for the specification, execution and management of shared business processes in dynamic VEs.

We present a unified approach for delivering hypermedia/multimedia objects over broadband networks. Documents are stored in various multimedia servers, while the inline data may reside in their own media servers, attached to the multimedia servers. The described service consists of several multimedia servers and a set of functions that intend to present to the end user interactive information in real time. Users interact with the service requesting multimedia documents on demand. Various media streams are transmitted over different parallel connections according to their transmission requirements. The hypermedia documents are structured using a hypermedia markup language that keeps information of the spatio temporal relationships among document's media components. In order to deal with the variant network behavior, buffering manipulation mechanisms and grading of the transmitted media quality techniques are proposed to smooth presentation and synchronization anomalies.