A Services Oriented Framework for Integrated and Customizable Collaborative Environment

How to develop a reusable and reliable framework to integrate the distributed heterogeneous services for collaboratories projects is one of the most important factors that affect their successful deployment and operation [2]. An ideal collaboratories model should deal with integrating and customizing the key components such as task assignment, multimedia communication, data sharing, knowledge management, instruments access and computation services. This paper presents a service oriented framework that overcomes the drawback of one-off, hand-crafted approaches for developing collaboratories environment. This framework supports VO (Virtual Organization) management services and is easy to be tailored. By developing a service bus communicating protocol, we achieve a lightweight framework with customizability and expandability. It can integrate self-made and third party collaborative tools, then select and customize such tools to meet with specific collaboration platform needs from various domains. The framework has been successfully applied to several multi-disciplinary scientific collaboratories projects in China.