TOGA—a customizable service for data-centric collaboration

Abstract

Collaboration in cooperative information systems, like concurrent design and engineering, exploits common work and information spaces. In this paper we introduce the TOGA service (Transaction-Oriented Group and Coordination Service for Data-Centric Applications), which offers group management facilities and a push model for change propagation w.r.t. shared data, thus allowing for group awareness. Through TOGA’s customizability and its layered architecture the service can be adapted to a variety of different collaboration scenarios. Multiple communication protocols (CORBA, UDP/IP, TCP/IP) are supported as well as basic transaction properties. Our approach enables the evolution of a set of separate applications to form a cooperative information system, i.e., it provides a technique towards component-oriented system engineering. In this paper we report on design issues, implementation aspects, and first experiences gained with the TOGA prototype.