An architecture to support communities of interest using directory services capabilities

Directory services provide a mechanism to describe internal resources that can be dynamically discovered and used, and are increasingly being adopted by organizations. Despite being in an era of extensive interorganizational collaboration, relatively little attention has been given to extending directory services across organizational boundaries. In particular, resources described using directory services are either (a) constrained by description possibilities or (b) cannot be widely understood due to idiosyncratic description mechanisms. Thus, current directory services approaches are not well suited for the information requirements of groups of individuals spanning organizational boundaries: communities of interest (COIs). A COI is a virtual community that benefits from electronic communication, especially by the ability to provide structured descriptions of relevant resources. This paper describes a new approach to support COIs through directory services by enabling autonomous entities to provide structured, evolutionary descriptions of members and resources while retaining directory services´ core strength: structured, semantically coherent descriptions of resources. The requirements architecture is derived, a walkthrough of the architectural elements is given, and a research prototype is briefly described.