Resource-Oriented Computing: Towards a Univeral Virtual Workspace

Emerging popular Web applications such as blogs and Wikipedia are transforming the Internet into a global collaborative environment where most people can participate and contribute. When resources created by and shared among people are not just content but also software artifacts, a much more accommodating, universal, and virtual workspace is foreseeable that can support people with diverse background and needs. To realize the goal, it requires not only necessary infrastructure support for resource deployment and composition, but also strategies and mechanisms to handle the implied complexity. We propose a service-oriented architecture in which arbitrary resources are associated with syntactical descriptors, called metaphors, based on which runtime services can be instantiated and managed. Furthermore, service composition can be achieved through syntactic metaphor composition. We demonstrate our approach via an e-Science workbench that allows user to access and combine distributed computing and storage resources in a flexible manner.