Distributed collaborations within networked enterprises and e-science have been changing radically over the last years. Enterprises and e-science environments demand increased flexibility, interconnectivity, and autonomy of involved systems as well as new coordination and interaction styles for collaboration among people. The latest trends in distributed and mobile collaboration technologies allow people to work across organizational boundaries and to collaborate among/in organizations and communities. The ability to access the organization's distributed knowledge base and to cooperate with co-workers is still a requirement, but new paradigms such as service-oriented computing and Grid computing increase pervasiveness, and mobility enable new scenarios and lead to higher complexity of systems. Independently of the business and e-science domains, individual "collaboration" has become a hot issue. Virtual communities have enjoyed a tremendous popularity recently and are starting to require functionalities for collaboration in the broadest sense similar to those in business and e-science environments. The wide-spread availability of mobile devices makes support for mobility an arising topic in this domain as well.

Many questions to fully enable such scenarios are the subject of ongoing research and are attracting more attention still. For example: How to enable users to retain their ability to cooperate while not being in their home environment? What is the role of context and location in determining how cooperation can be carried out? How can resources be described semantically in a meaningful way to more efficiently exploit the limited resources in mobile environments by supporting better ways of providing data relevant to the user, enabling improved interoperability with the environment and with other mobile users, and deciding when and how to process data? How to provide support for ad-hoc cooperation in situations where the dedicated infrastructure is absent or cannot be used? How will service-oriented computing and Grid computing change collaborative software? How to support software in diverse, small devices such as PDAs and smartphones to access heterogeneous, large-scale resources, such as in the Grid, for large scale collaboration and teamwork, such as in disaster scenarios. How to provide interoperable collaboration services? Which is the shared vocabulary to be used to achieve a common understanding at the semantic level when the collaboration takes place over community or enterprise boundaries?
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Workshop Activities and Goals

Software architectures for distributed and mobile cooperative communities must support the fundamental requirements for distributed cooperation: efficient and semantically enhanced information sharing across a widely distributed environment; constant and timely update of distributed knowledge bases with many different sites acting both as potential users and potential providers of information; shared access to a services; security and trust in these environments, different access modes to the same information, and so on. These cross-cutting questions require an interdisciplinary view on the domain and input from a variety of fields, such as workflow systems, groupware and CSCW, event-based systems, software architecture, distributed database systems, mobile computing, pervasive computing, Grid computing etc.

This workshop addresses the interdisciplinary issues of the domain and bring together researchers and practitioners from distributed systems, workflow, CSCW, mobile data management, databases, knowledge management/semantics, grid computing, and software engineering to discuss the common interests, share and exchange expertise and results, appreciate each other's results and contributions, and to provide application developers with facilities (middleware, infrastructures, architectures, tools) that enable the development and deployment of applications supporting distributed collaboration in mobile and pervasive environments.
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Topics

* Coordination models, languages, and systems for distributed and mobile collaboration
* Models and architectures for loosely-coupled and large-scale teamwork
* Models and architectures for adaptive collaboration
* Peer-to-peer and pervasive Grid based collaboration
* Integration and interoperability models for distributed and mobile collaboration
* SOA-based, pervasive collaboration services architecture and protocols


* Ontologies for collaboration support and social software
* Semantic process and data description and management for distributed and mobile collaboration
* Interaction patterns for distributed and mobile collaboration
* Security, privacy, and trust in distributed and mobile collaboration
* Quality of service in mobile collaboration
* Context model for distributed and mobile collaboration


* Middleware for context management in distributed and mobile collaboration
* Middleware communications, infrastructure for semantically and rich data in mobile and distributed collaboration
* Context-aware collaboration middleware
* Enabling infrastructures to support collaboration in distributed and mobile environments


* Ontology-based personal information management tools (e.g., for calendars, address books, e-mail, documents, and ideas)
* Mobile and distributed collaboration tools in ad-hoc/virtual communities and networked enterprises
* Collaborative applications for mobile users
* Real-world case studies and experiences for distributed and mobile collaboration


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Important Dates

* Full paper submission: March 3, 2008
* Authors Notification: April 21, 2008
* Camera-ready versions: May 26, 2008
* WETICE advanced registration with discount: TBA
* WETICE workshops and on-site registration: June 23-25, 2008