A framework for collaborative working environments

Abstract

To utilize the advantages of existing and emerging Internet techniques and to meet the demands for a new generation of collaborative working environments, a framework with an upperware-middleware architecture is proposed, which consists of four layers: resource layer, middleware layer, upperware layer and application layer. The upperware contains intelligent agents and plug/play facilities; the former coordinates and controls multiple middleware techniques such as Grid computing, Web-services and mobile agents, while the latter are used for the applications, such as semantic CAD, to plug and loose couple into the system. The method of migrating legacy software using automatic wrapper generation technique is also presented. A prototype mobile environment for collaborative product design is presented to illustrate the utilization of the CWE framework in collaborative design and manufacture.

POPEYE: providing collaborative services for ad hoc and spontaneous communities

“…In [29] authors present a framework for collaborative working environments which consists of four layers: resource layer, middleware layer, upperware layer, and application layer. Similarly to POPEYE, the upperware contains plug/ play facilities for adding new functionalities.…”

Semantic Similarity Based on Ontology Technology and its Application in Mobile Information Retrieval for Product Design

“…A knowledge representation framework has been adopted which accommodates semantic relationships and similarity of product data; and a case study in information retrieval is presented in this section which is a lab test for the Hunan Power Station, China. SSCQS is based on the previous services platform that provides flexible node recommendations under given conditions in terms of user profile, context, and privacy concern preferences [3]. SSCQS can automatically identify user input based on the ontology database in the Web Server.…”

“…Wireless computing technology become promising for pervasive personalization services which run anytime, anywhere, and on any device; for example, Engineers can view the eDrawing files in the latest iPhone or modify and design the CAD files in the PDA (Personal digital assistant) [4]. However, the literature survey reveals that although the progress of mobile technologies on wireless networks has largely changed the way people access Internet information, it is lag behand to apply mobile computing technique to share and retrieve product information for collaborative design [1,3,4]. The reasons are shown below: one is due to the distinct features of mobile devices and wireless networks (such as limited bandwidth, unreliability of wireless networks, etc.…”

“…The values of SS can be used as a measure to determine the rank of each answer, which helps users find useful information related to the input data. With the authors' previous research in ontology construction and modelling in product data [3,4], all the input data and return results are assigned the value of semantic similarity; the mobile SSCQS (semantic similarity cooperative query system) utilizes the new semantic similarity calculation approach to provide a straightforward and efficient method to rank the query input and the server results sorted by the value of SS.…”