Abstract
As it has been observed in the recent decade, collaborating teams become ever more unstable, less tightly coupled and more distributed and mobile. Workers participate in multiple teams that pursue different goals that need not be related in any way. This radical way in which the workplace is changing for the individual and the team requires highly adaptable groupware and intelligent support for the individual in order to minimize the time lost for management and coordination when switching between different teams, different workspaces, and different contexts. Thus, a service-oriented approach seems promising to provide individual, context-aware building blocks for adaptable groupware.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Web Service: A Web service is a self-contained software component offering a well-defined interface, accessible through standardized protocols by remote clients. Loose coupling of Web services enables flexibility and reusability.
Team Context: Context that describes the situation of a group of individuals, including information on interdependencies and relations between team members such as coupling, vision, spatial clustering, and dynamics.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): A paradigm in distributed systems that introduces the concept of describing, publishing, finding, binding, composing, and invoking (Web) services.
Human Interaction Pattern: The term human interaction pattern refers to a common, reccurring interaction scenario between collaborating actors situated in CSCW environments.
Context Meta Model: Meta model describing properties of a context model, thereby enabling context transformation and aggregation across application domains and different forms of representations.
Ad-Hoc Collaboration: The type of collaboration that emerges spontaneously and does not follow a predefined process.
Service-Composition: The process of aggregating a number of heterogeneous services to create more sophisticated functionality. In the domain of e-collaboration, service composition enables peers to combine simple services to generate highly complex functions.