Coppeer Documents: An Agent Based Approach to Collaborative and Incremental Development of Document Oriented Peer-to-peer Systems

It may be very difficult to design in advance a global system model which accomplishes all organizational unit idiosyncrasies in complex organizations dispersed across large geographical regions. In this work, we propose the use of our Coppeer framework for agent based peer-to-peer application development to implement an environment in which distributed systems can be collaboratively and incrementally built. The key points of the approach are the use of semi-structured documents as data model, the partitioning of system code in several loosely coupled agents and the use of ontologies to conciliate differences in organizational unit vocabularies.