Whitehead , Jr . , Kenneth M . Anderson ,

Want to launch a virtual enterprise using the Web as your technology infrastructure? First learn what's missing from today's Web architecture and which extensions are needed for large-scale collaboration. T he WorldWide Web connects islands of information, along with the people seeking that information, from within corporate intranets and across the global Internet, easily and effectively. Sharing information without regard to physical location has prompted new forms of virtual business and social endeavors. A virtual enterprise is an organization uncon-strained by geographic location, and a membership intersecting multiple traditional organizations. Virtual enterprises can be formed within large corporations (consisting of groups at distributed sites), as parts of business alliances or task forces [4], and even among individuals working independently of any corporate connection. Indeed, all that is needed to form a virtual enterprise is at least one common goal, a shared information space, a means of coordinating users' efforts, and people willing to share the work. The Web provides the minimum for setting up such enterprises by enabling identification of shared goals and the people who share them, by providing a standard mechanism for reading the shared information space, and by supporting coordination via email archives. However, the existing Web support infra