Reference Architecture for Virtual Organization

Reference Architecture for Virtual Organization

Abstract

“United we stand, divided we fall" is a well known saying. We are living in the era of virtual collaborations. Resources are logical and solutions are virtual. Advancement on conceptual and technological level has enhanced the way people communicate. Everything-as-a-Service once a dream, now becoming a reality. Problem nature has also been changed over the time. Today, e-Collaborations are applied to all the domains possible. Medical, engineering, meteorology, biology, chemistry, physics, earthquake and weather forecast, social networks and so on, all are using electronic platforms. Extensive data and computing resources are in need and assistance from human experts is also becoming essential. This puts a great responsibility on Information Technology (IT) researchers and developers to provide generic platforms where user can easily communicate and solve their problems. To realize this concept, distributed computing has offered many paradigms, e.g. cluster, grid, cloud computing. Virtual Organization (VO) is a logical orchestration of globally dispersed resources to achieve common goals. Existing paradigms and technology is used to form Virtual Organization, but lack of standards remained a critical issue for last two decades. Our research endeavor focuses on developing a standard for Virtual Organization building process. The proposed standardization process is a two phase activity. First phase provides requirement analysis and the second phase presents a Reference Architecture for Virtual Organization (RAVO). This form of standardization is chosen to accommodate both technological and paradigm shift. We categorize our efforts in two parts. First part consists of a pattern to identify the requirements and components of a Virtual Organization. Second part details a generic framework based on the concept of Everything-as-a-Service. Stakeholders are an important entity in any collaborative environment. We developed a pattern for stakeholders and presented new relationship between user and resources in form of Subject. Finally, these concepts are materialized as a concrete framework in the domain of E-learning and Computational Intelligence. Stakeholders and Subject relationship are also verified in the domain of informal Virtual Organizations (e.g. Social Networks). For evaluation purpose an instance based on RAVO, named N2SKY is developed by a master student at the University of Vienna.

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Authors
  • Khalil, Wajeeha
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Projects
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Shortfacts
Category
Thesis (PhD)
Divisions
Workflow Systems and Technology
Subjects
Angewandte Informatik
Webmanagement
Date
2012
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