Abstract:
The Internet, the World Wide Web, JavaTM technology, and
software components are changing the software business. Activities
traditionally constrained by the need for intense information
management increasingly involve cooperating organizations. Information
management tools and techniques do not scale well in the face of this
organizational complexity. Informal sharing, based largely on manual
copying of information, cannot meet the demands of the task as size
and complexity increase. Formal approaches to sharing information are
based on groupware tools, but cooperating organizations do not always
enjoy the trust or commonality of sophisticated infrastructure,
methods, and skills that this approach requires. The application web
is a simple, loosely coupled, highly flexible strategy for information
sharing that bridges the gap. Extensive information relevant to
different parts of the software life cycle is interconnected in a
simple, easily described way; such connections permit selective
information sharing by a variety of tools and in a variety of
collaboration modes that vary in the amount of organizational coupling
they require.
IEEE 8th International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, Stanford University, California, USA, 16-18 June 1999.
15 pages (PDF)