Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

Coast research domain is data centred service oriented computing and collaboration. With the raise of the Web as a platform, people consume applications as services from the web or from mobile apps. These applications are cooperative, human centred and connected to social applications. They must cope with unprecedented load and their deployment in Cloud environment requires sophisticated architectures. Their users are distributed in space (people live in different locations), in time (people participate at different time) and they cross organizational barriers. Coordination is hard and privacy and trust are key issues. New challenges appear every day. We have chosen to consider them regarding three dimensions that are primary for web and service based system stakeholders :

1. The first dimension refers to collaborative management of 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.

3. The third dimension concerns non functional aspects of data and service management, and more particularly the security and trust dimensions that are basics to ensure a wide acceptance of the approaches that we advocate.

We consider these dimensions at a Web scale and in contexts where there is no central authority. This raises many issues 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 since we want to offer collaborators a flexibility concerning the chosen work models and technologies. We are tackling these 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 development.

• 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.