Development of Collaboration Frameworks for Distributed Web Information Systems

Web information systems (WISs) are data-intensive systems that are open to the worldwide web. State of the art is that their implementation is already well-supported by a large number of tools and standards, as well as their multi-layered specification is supported by several integrated methods, in particular the Co-Design approach to WIS development (CoDWIS). Key components of CoDWIS are storyboarding using the SiteLang specification language, and sophisticated extended views, which are called media types. However, an open issue in the methodology is the support of collaborative WISs, i.e. systems, in which tasks can only be achieved by collaboration among a group of users. In this paper exchange frameworks are proposed to close this gap. They are based on media types, on exchange architectures, and an explicit specification of collaboration. The usefulness and applicability of our framework is demonstrated on the basis of an e-learning web information system that supports cooperative practical training.