A Telecooperation Framework Based on Broker and Trading Services

Telecooperation receives increasing importance in a globalized information and work infrastructure. Among others, teleconferencing and workflow management are technological areas being studied and developed to support telecooperation scenarios. I.e. real-time collaboration tasks are being supported by teleconferencing systems, asynchronous tasks are being supported by workflow management systems. An integrated telecooperation framework for both approaches is described which uses a conference broker to couple both system types. The close coupling, however, is not transparent with respect to the actual instances of used systems. This lack in service selection transparency also results in a lack of location transparency. Thus, we extend our framework by a trading service. Workflow modules act as the importers of teleconferencing services being exported by conference modules. A distributed trading service mediates between service offers and service requests. The trader is self-sufficient as it does not require any distributed platform, such as CORBA or DCE. It may be deployed in a standard internet infrastructure.