A Service Oriented Architecture for Coordination in Collaborative Environments

An important feature in collaborative environment is coordination, defined as the act of managing interdependencies between activities performed to achieve a goal. These interdependencies can be the result of loosely integrated collaborative activities (the use of coordination processes within the collaboration activities is not required) or tightly integrated collaborative activities (sophisticated coordination mechanisms are necessary). The existence of both activities along with the dynamic nature of these environments adds a greater complexity to the coordination that has not been taken into account in traditional collaborative systems. In this work, the authors present a partially Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) that defines and maintains dynamic coordination polities in collaborative systems based on coordination models.