A model transformation framework to boost productivity and creativity in collaborative working environments

Collaborative working environments consist of a network of spatially dispersed actors (either humans or not) that play different roles and cooperate to achieve a common goal. Notwithstanding the ever increasing potential of innovative software and network technologies, collaborative working environments still require advanced solutions to effectively managing their inherent complexity, thereby boosting productivity and creativity. Essential components of innovative service-based collaborative working environments are collaboration-aware services that embed the required point-to-point or multi-point interaction patterns to support the flexible orchestration of distributed and concurrent activities. This paper introduces an approach that attempts to overcome the above mentioned drawbacks of current collaborative working environments by exploiting the precepts recently introduced by model-driven development and MDA (model driven architecture). The proposed approach is guided by a model transformation framework that makes use of the set of MDA-related standards (MOF, QVT and XMI) to obtain a high degree of automation, so that interoperable model transformation services can be implemented in a timely and efficient way. At the end, the single tool usually operated by a given worker can be considered as a virtual collaborative platform for creating and automatically transforming models of different types and at various levels of abstraction.