WINK: a Web-based system for collaborative project management in virtual enterprises

The increasing of globalization and flexibility required to the companies has generated, in the last decade, new issues, related to the managing of large scale projects within geographically distributed networks and to the cooperation of enterprises. ICT support systems are required to allow enterprises to share information, guarantee data-consistency and establish synchronized and collaborative processes. In this paper, we present a collaborative project management system that integrates data coming from aerospace industries with two main goals: avoiding inconsistencies generated by updates at the sources´ level and minimizing data replications. The proposed system is composed of a collaborative project management component supported by a Web interface, a multiagent data integration component, which supports information sharing and querying, and SOAP enabled Web-services which ensure the whole interoperability of the software components. The system was developed by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Gruppo Formula S.p.A. and Alenia Spazio S.p.A. within the EU WINK Project (Web-linked Integration of Network based Knowledge - IST-2000-28221).