COAST

Web Scale Trustworthy Collaborative Service Systems

Department 3 : Networks, systems and services

Team leader : Claudia Ignat
Mail : claudia.ignat@loria.fr

Team presentation

The advent of the Cloud, of smart mobile devices and of service-based
architecture has opened a field of possibilities as wide as the
invention of the Web 20 years ago. Nowadays, software companies can
deliver applications and services using the web as a platform. From text
to video editing, from data analytics to process management, they can
distribute business applications to users on their web browser or on
some mobile appliance. These services are mostly human centred and
deployed on sophisticated infrastructures that can cope with very high
loads. The Software as a Service approach (SaaS) highlights their
cooperative nature, by enabling the storage of data in cloud
infrastructures that can be easily shared among users.

Thus, clients consume applications through service API (web services),
available on delivery platforms, called stores or markets. This approach
of the distribution of software outstrips the traditional software
distribution channels, in both scale and opportunity. Here, scale
concerns the number of users (communities rather than groups), the size
of data produced and managed (billions of documents), the number of
services and of organizations (tens of thousands). Opportunity refers to
the infinite number of combinations between these services.

In this context, we aim at providing support to build trustworthy
collaborative applications based on the knowledge from replication
algorithms, from the composition of services and from services quality
that can be deduced and monitored. The complexity of the context in
which applications are executed does not allow to provide proven guarantees.

Our goal is to base our work on a contractual and monitored approach to
give to users confidence in the service they use. It is very surprising
to see how people rely today on services with very little knowledge
about the amount of confidence they can put in these services. As soon
as these services are based on composition of other unknown services, it
becomes very difficult to understand the consequences of the failure of
a component of the composition for instance.

Research activities

– The management of large scale collaborative data and the support for
collaborative application at the scale of the web
– Data centred service composition to support the engineering of safe
applications at a large scale
– Trustworthy collaborative Software Systems

Research themes

– Collaborative Data Management – Service Oriented Computing – Business Process Management – Optimistic Replication – Collaborative Systems

International and industrial relations

UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Hive, Linagora