What is Cooperative Information Systems

Scientific experiments are supported by activities that create, use, communicate and distribute information and whose organizational dynamics is similar to processes performed by distributed cooperative enterprise units. The aim of this chapter is to describe the approach undertaken in the Advanced Lab for Bioinformatics Agencies (ALBA) project to the design and management of cooperative scientific experiments (Bosin et al., 2006). A framework is used that defines the responsibility of computational nodes in offering services and the set of rules under which each service can be accessed by networked nodes through invocation mechanisms in the service-oriented style of computing and collaborating (COOPIS, 2005).