A framework to collaborative and incremental development of distributed information systems

Abstract

In this work, we approach the problem of developing corporate information systems in complex organizations dispersed across large geographical regions. Under these circumstances, management of differences among organizational unit requirements and implementation of new requirements over time may be cumbersome. We present a proposal to handle this problem by combining the use of semi-structured documents as data model, the partitioning of system code in several loosely coupled agents and the use of ontologies to conciliate differences in organizational unit vocabularies. We also describe an implementation of the proposal based on our Coppeer agent platform. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.