Architecting a Service-Oriented Collaborative Web

The Web Services movement is transforming the Internet into a virtual operating system where heterogeneous, distributed software systems can collaborate through standard communication protocols. The movement has the potential to realize a universal collaboration environment where people can collaborate by creating their own services for others to use, and by combining services from others to solve their own problems. However, such a vision of serviceoriented collaboration is possible only when sufficient support for end users to create personalized services is widely available. To encourage the development of advanced tools for generic service construction and composition, we propose a service-oriented architecture in which two important entities, called service containers and workbenches, are made explicit and protocols for them are defined. Since the architecture is component-oriented and unifies both the client side and the server side, we show that it can accommodate more elaborated collaboration scenarios than existing service-oriented architectures, and believe that it can help reducing unnecessary fragmentation of the emerging service Web - an important step towards the universal service-oriented collaboration goal.