An HTTP-based distributed architecture supporting dynamic cooperation processes

In research projects, or in the development of novel ideas and industry products, several teams cooperate together, bringing expertise, data sets and documents to the common effort. The collaborative effort can be seen as a dynamic workflow, i.e. a process whose activities are not predefined but added based on the specific goals and intermediate results; during an activity, several people, possibly belonging to different teams, cooperate to analyze data, prepare new documents and data sets. However, a dynamic workflow model can effectively support the cooperative effort, but only a decentralized system (a federation of hosts) can effectively help the cooperation of heterogeneous (and jealous of their human resources and data sets) teams. In this paper, we discuss the architecture of the decentralized cooperative workflow system, whose first prototype is under implementation.