Online Interaction Analysis Framework for Ad-Hoc Collaborative Processes in SOA-Based Environments

Today’s collaboration in e-science and business environments is no longer limited to the boundary of a single organization. People belonging to different organizations collaborate together to achieve a common goal by establishing virtual teams. The current trend is to rely on SOA-based tools and services for virtual teams and their collaborative processes because SOA offers many technologies to simplify the integration and interoperability of services belonging to different organizations and to allow the user to easily access existing services and tools. In complex environments comprising distributed software services and people, we need to understand how people and software services interact in order to adapt activities and services to the change of their operating environments as well as to allow them to self-manage their behaviors during the collaboration. We observed that there is a lack of tools supporting the analysis of interactions in such ad-hoc collaborative processes at runtime. In this paper we present our VOIA(Vienna Online Interaction Analysis) framework which aims at analyzing interactions within collaborative processes in SOA-based environments. We present a comprehensive list of interaction metrics and patterns associated with ad-hoc collaborations and techniques used to determine these metrics and patterns. We discuss how metrics and patterns can be used in process adaptation and illustrate VOIA’s capabilities with several experiments.