WGWSOA: A Service-Oriented Middleware Architecture to support Groupware Interoperability

Collaborative Systems are applications that demand for the distribution support of their resources. Usually, middle-wares have been deployed as a development platform for such applications. In spite of manipulating objects (documents, meetings, agenda, discussion list, etc.) with same semantics, it is not possible for an application to access both objects and data of another distinguishable application, even though they have been built by the use of the same middleware platform. The complexity of this scenario becomes larger when we idealize a project that demand for the interoperability of groupware applications developed by the use of distinct middlewares. The goal of this paper is to present an architecture based on middleware services -named WGWSOA (Web-based Groupware Service Oriented Architecture) -for Collaborative Systems. From this architecture, we hope to offer specific services in order to leverage the interoperability concerns of such systems.