Section: Scientific Foundations

Introduction

Our scientific foundations are grounded on two different dimensions, distributed collaborative systems supported by sophisticated data sharing mechanisms and service oriented computing with an emphasis on orchestration and on non functional properties.

Distributed collaborative systems enable distributed group work using computer technologies. Designing such systems require an expertise in the domain of Distributed Systems (DS) and in the Computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) research area. Besides theoretical and technical aspects of distributed systems, design of distributed collaborative systems must take into account the human factor to offer solutions suitable for users and groups. SCORE team vision is to move away from a centralized authority based collaboration towards a decentralized collaboration where users have full control over their data that they can store locally and can decide with whom to share them. In this type of collaboration SCORE team investigated the issues of management of distributed shared data and coordination between users and groups.

Service oriented Computing  [33] is an established domain in which the ECOO and now the SCORE team has been working on for a long time. It refers to the general discipline that studies the development of computer applications at the scale of the web. In this context, a service is an independent software program with a specific functional context and capabilities published as a service contract (or more traditionally an API). Service composition is the aggregation of a set of services whose interactions are coordinated. The scale, the autonomy of services, the heterogeneity and some well defined design principles underlying SoC opens new research questions that are at the basis of the SCORE problematic and that spans the disciplines of distributed computing, software engineering and CSCW. Our approach to contribute to the general vision of Service Oriented Computing and more generally to the emerging discipline of Service Science has been and is still to focus on the question of the efficient and flexible construction of reliable and secure high level services through the coordination/orchestration/composition of other services provided by distributed organizations or people.