ECOSPACE/CERA

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[edit] Collaborative Environment Reference Architecture (CERA)

"The ECOSPACE vision is to bring together semantic and social web (Web 2.0) through a user-centric interoperability approach towards the collaborative web or web 3.0!"

[edit] CWE Reference Architecture

The CWE Reference Architecture describes the main building blocks, system components and artifacts with their interrelationships as a template solution to be reused while building architectures and designing systems for CWE. Being a “reference” architecture means being as technology-independent as possible.

The ECOSPACE project endorses this architecture and implements tools and prototypes that validate the proposed reference architecture by demonstrating at the same time a possible implementation direction exploiting state-of-the-art technologies like SOA, Semantic Web and Widgets.

A layered approach has been followed to present the architecture. This approach defines seven layers which can be presented in two groups: horizontal and vertical. Here, we present a brief description of each component. For more information, please refer to [1, 2]

• Horizontal
  • Basic Service layer: Here the Basic Collaborative Services (BCSs) can be found. A BCS represents a simple collaborative task that can not be divided into smaller parts, e.g. create a blog, send an e-mail, or upload a document. This is a fundamental layer as it provides the building blocks for constructing the other layers. It is populated by ideally all available BCSs in the CWE domain.
  • Orchestration layer: This layer is populated by Composite Collaborative Services (CoCoS). These services are defined as sets of BCSs combined in a defined order to provide value-added collaborative functionality to the user. E.g. upload document and notify all users, inform users about an appointment. ECOSPACE has already identified and documented a number of BCSs [3-5]
  • Collaborative Application Layer: Here we find the software applications that employ the capabilities of basic services and/or orchestrated services that the user wishes to use, e.g. BSCW, BC.
  • Desktop Layer: This represents the user interface or front-end which is used by eProfessionals to interact with one or more CWE applications. This interface is decoupled from the other layers.
• Vertical
  • Semantic Infrastructure Layer: This layer stores models, metadata and rules to be used by all the other layers in order to provide “intelligence”, contextualization and personalization of CWE functionalities and services.
  • Registry/Repository Layer: This layer stores information on where the several components and information associated to the artifacts that populate the other layers can be found.
  • QoS Layer: This layer provides the capabilities required to monitor, manage, and maintain QoS such as security, error handling, transaction management, scalability and reliability.

[edit] References

1. Peristeras, V., et al., D.2.1 Version 2 - Versions of the API, Ontology, and Reference Architecture. Ecospace, Dec 2007.
2. Peristeras, V., et al., Towards a Reference Architecture for Collaborative Work Environments. International Journal of e-Collaboration, 2008(Special Issue on Collaborative Work Environments).
3. Peristeras, V. and M. Fradinho, DOCUMENT TO BE INCLUDED. 2008.
4. Peristeras, V., et al., D.2.1 Version 1 - Versions of the API, Ontology, and Reference Architecture. Ecospace Project (FP6-IST-535208) Deliverable, Feb 2007.
5. (2008) CWE Technologies. http://www.cwe-projects.eu/ecospace/CWE_Technologies