Data Management and Integration within Collaborative Working Environments

With increasingly distributed and inhomogeneous resources, sharing knowledge, information, or data becomes more and more difficult and manageable for both, end-users and providers. To reduce administrative overheads and ease complicated and time-consuming integration tasks of widely dispersed (data) resources, quite a few solutions for collaborative data sharing and access have been designed and introduced in several European research projects for example in CoSpaces and ViroLab. These two projects basically concentrate on the development of collaborative working environments for different user communities such as engineering teams as well as health professionals with a particular focus on the integration of heterogeneous and large data resources into the system’s infrastructure. In this paper, we present the two approaches realised within CoSpaces and ViroLab to overcome the difficulties of integrating multiple data resources and making them accessible in a user-friendly but also secure way. We start with an analysis on systems’ specifications describing user and provider requirements for appropriate solutions. Finally, we conclude with an outlook and give some recommendations how those systems can be further enhanced in order to guarantee a certain level of dynamicity, scalability, reliability, and last but not least security and trustworthiness.