Towards a Coordination-Centric Architecture Metamodel for Social Web Applications

Social web applications like wikis, social networks, and crowdsourcing markets have provided people with new dynamic forms of communication and collaboration. Although communities have widely adopted these systems, the methodological support for their architecting is still at the beginning. Since social web applications are mediation environments for human interaction, environment-based coordination models like stigmergy have increased in relevance. Therefore, we propose the concept of a Stigmergic Information System (SIS) architecture metamodel, which embeds a stigmergy-like coordination model. The metamodel defines key system elements and organizes a system into four layers: agent, artifact data, analysis & control and workflow. The metamodel should support the systematic investigation of common architecture elements, their relations and interdependencies, and future approaches for the description and modeling of social web applications. In this work we introduce the SIS architecture metamodel and evaluate the metamodel’s validity with preliminary results from a pilot survey on groupware systems.