The focus of this project is on the development of conceptual foundations along with a middleware infrastructure for rapid construction of dynamic and secure distributed collaborations. This project is investigating techniques for constructing dynamic collaboration environments from their high-level specifications. These specifications are interfaced with a middleware to build the desired environment. This project is developing techniques for specifying a collaboration plan using XML and mechanisms for a mobile agent based middleware for implementing such a plan. A collaboration specification identifies the participants in a collaboration by their roles, and also specifies the associated role-based security policies. It specifies the shared objects together with the coordination and workflow requirements for information flow among the participants. Mechanisms are being investigated for participants to dynamically join or leave an environment. These include mechanisms for authentication of a participant's credentials, assignment of roles, and discovery of resources by a participant. These mechanisms and services are integrated in an agent based middleware, using the Ajanta agent programming system, for constructing distributed collaborations. This middleware investigates use of mobile agents for building transportable user interfaces, for executing remote coordination actions, and as mobile workflow objects. It also provides support for resource discovery, naming, event management, and security.
