Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

SCORE research domain is cooperative, distributed, and Process-Aware Web Information Systems. The advent of the web 2.0 and its emphasis on services pushed new IS applications such as electronic commerce, collaborative editing, e-learning, e-engineering to become widespread. A common characteristic of these applications is that they are cooperative, human-centered, creative by nature but also driven by sophisticated underlying infrastructure. Such applications are also distributed in space (people work in different locations), in time (people work at different time) and they cross organizational barriers, making difficult their coordination and crucial the issues of privacy and trust. In this domain, the evolution of the Internet and of the Web seems to open new challenges and questions every day. In our case, we have chosen to consider two dimensions of the issues faced by users and developers of web and service based systems :

1. The first dimension refers to management of collaborative data, a key aspect in the development of distributed collaborative systems.

2. The second dimension is concerned with assembling and coordinating high level services, involving people, applications, and information sources on the basis of process models. This is part of the service oriented computing research field.

We are considering these two dimensions at a Web scale where there is no central authority that governs the system. This raises many challenges related to governance, compliance and security, trust and privacy but also to awareness and coordination. At this scale, we are also always facing the recurring problem of interoperability as we want to offer collaborators a flexibility concerning the chosen work models and technologies. We are tackling these two dimensions in specific domains where they have strong interrelations:

• in software engineering where it is always difficult to find the best compromise between explicit and implicit coordination and where stands the difficulties related to collaborative software writing.

• in crisis management where many organisations have to cooperate in a very ad hoc way, share data and coordinate with a constantly changing goal, with very big issues at stake and with strong political emphasis.

• and in all domains where there is a strong need for cooperation;