Co-working and management of federated information-clusters

This paper presents a facility for definition and management of federated clusters of interrelated information. In a co-working environment, team members need to exchange information in order to coordinate their tasks execution, where typically the information is distributed over several cooperating autonomous systems. The co-working facility described in this paper supports the sharing and exchange of federated information among systems, and the access to structured clusters as single complex entities. The support for management of federated information-clusters, the cooperation workspaces, and the extended local schema are innovative mechanisms being developed as a part of the integration facility of PEER federated object-oriented information management system. An example from the manufacturing application domain namely, the layout optimization, is chosen for this paper to represent several features of the co-working facility. This application supports four kinds of expert systems that cooperate and exchange complex and structured information in order to coordinate their interrelated tasks. Each expert system plays a part in layout design and in the optimization of piece allocations on plates of raw material. The paper presents the schema definition of a cooperation workspace for these expert systems.