A Web Service Approach to Universal Accessibility in Collaboration Services

The enormous growth in wireless communications and miniaturized handheld devices in the last few years, have given rise to a vast range of new services, for heterogeneous user environments. In this paper, we investigate the nature of designing distributed services that accommodate pervasive devices. We introduce Universal Accessible Web service architecture, CAROUSEL Web service. We present our collaborative Web services model linked with an event brokering service, NaradaBrokering. We discuss how a rich synchronous and asynchronous collaboration environment can support virtual communications while being built on top of a Web service infrastructure, based on industry standard portal technologies such as XML, Apache’s Jetspeed, and WSDL. The linkage of the event brokering system with a Web service based architecture is one of the critical design issues in message-based collaborative application. We also describe the approach to universal access mechanisms in our collaborative Web service model. Also included is a discussion of the prototype collaborative SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) browser that we developed as a Web service.