Conclusions

The PageSpace is an Open LTR project (the first one in software) involving Technische Universit Berlin and the University of Bologna. In this first phase, we are surveying advanced coordination applications of the WWW, studying the middleware necessary to support these applications, formulating it in terms of coordination primitives written in Shade or Laura, and developing a preliminary design and prototype of such a middleware.

With the prototype we intend to demonstrate how the PageSpace concept is suited for designing coordination systems at a world-wide scale by setting up a common framework and implementing typical agents that offer useful services.

We can envision several applications of PageSpace. We are currently concentrating on studying some in office automation, process centered environments, and concurrent engineering, which are directly grounded on rule-based, coordinated workflow frameworks and groupware applications.

• monitoring process-centered environments: documents are stored and retrieved representing the state of a software process [6].

• distributed auction bidding: the Web is used to sell and buy goods using stock exchange mechanisms [5].

• infotainment servers integrated in the WWW, implementing services such as the Internet Chess Server, a virtual chess club where games can be played, observed and commented.

Acknowledgements. We thank for support the EU Open LTR project PageSpace n. 20179. P. Ciancarini was also partially supported by Italian CNR.