Lukasz Beca, Geoffrey C. Fox, and Marek Podgorny proposed a Component Architecture for Building Web-based Synchronous Collaboration Systems . Following the main principles of component based software development, namely hiding complexity and supporting reusability, sophisticated collaborative applications can be created in a comparatively easy way. Certainly, this collection of papers was not written with the mind to provide shared services. But maybe these ideas can help to trigger a slightly different and new point of view on the area of collaboration and collaborative systems in the Web. No single programming language will be sufficient, no single vendor-specific tool is likely to be accepted, no data format will be the perfect one in every situation, etc.
Heterogeneity requires open standards for a component-oriented development.
This can lead to better search tools, robots, agents, mediator programs advertising and publishing their services to others etc. We would be glad if new research could be triggered by these ideas of our workshop.