Collaborative and secure resource management with distributed agents

As an increasing number of people communicate and collaborate computationally over the Internet, the need for a collaborative environment that facilitates secure and reliable access to large quantities of distributed resources has become manifest. However the breadth of resource distribution makes it difficult for Internet users to acquire the necessary resources for collaborative computing. We have developed a framework for an efficient infrastructure that provides a reasonable mapping between users and resources distributed over the Internet. The proposed framework contributes: (I) an authority mechanism that can be applied to independent and widely distributed resource-providers; (2) a resource hierarchy for partitioning global resource spaces into manageable subspaces; and (3) systematic management of dynamic groups Of users and resources running on different sites. This paper describes the schema and processes for resource partition, mapping, negotiation, and forming a resource domain in our framework.