Towards a Generic Service Oriented Framework for Integrated User Management of Virtual Communities

A central Service layer for the European eLearning Grid Infrastructure (ELeGI) is the one for the management of members and the provision of collaborational services (Virtual Community Services). Because it is a lot of effort to totally newly (re-)write the collaboration services like e.g. a videoconferencing service, it is much more desirable to take existing applications and just to wrap them with a Web Service interface to programmatically access the existing functionality relevant to user management. Thus, it is intended to create a pic’n’mix architecture, where existing collaboration tools can be easily added or removed.