POPEYE: A simple and reliable collaborative working environment over mobile ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Although useful and increasingly put into regular use, current collaborative working environment (CWE) solutions have several limitations and relevant needs for further research. Most systems address either rather traditional and rigid intra-organizational collaboration scenarios or, at the opposite, completely free and unstructured open communitiespsilas interactions. Emerging dynamic, flexible and ad-hoc collaboration schemes are hardly or not supported at all. Typically, explicit representation of the collaboration context, of workerspsila and teampsilas goals and the semantics of underlying business process are not addressed, and this makes difficult to ensure the context and process awareness, personalisation and collaboration support required in knowledge-rich interactions. Aiming at getting collaborative working environments free from rigid constraints, POPEYE considers P2P over wireless ad hoc groups, where fixed infrastructure is not a prerequisite, where virtual communities can emerge spontaneously and share data with the appropriate quality of service for business applications (persistence, synchronisation, security,....).