A Collaboration Service Model for a Global Port Cluster

The importance of port clusters to a global city may be viewed from a number of perspectives. The development of port clusters and economies of agglomeration and their contribution to a regional economy is underpinned by information and physical infrastructure that facilitates collaboration between business entities within the cluster. The maturity of technologies providing portals, web and middleware services provides an opportunity to push the boundaries of contemporary service reference models and service catalogues to what the authors propose to be “collaboration services”. Servicing port clusters, portal engineers of the future must consider collaboration services to benefit a region. Particularly, service orchestration through a “public user portal” must gain better utilisation of publically owned infrastructure, to share knowledge and collaborate among organisations through information systems.