The cooperation of such a collection of services requires storage of intermediate results and format conversions of these before they can be submitted as input to another service. Furthermore, services may be realized as stateful servers, where the user communicates in a sequence of steps until the result is computed. The MMM project at the Humboldt University in Berlin investigates these problems under a scenario coming from the daily work in the National Research Center SFB373 Quantification and Simulation of Economic Processes . It is a major aim of the research center to do statistical data analysis by combining most current methods from different disciplines. The MMM project aims to develop a system of servers and brokers.
Servers can encapsulate, e.g., interpreters for scripts written in the different languages.
Agents mediate between users and servers. Users contact brokers through WWW browsers and have by that a platform independent user interface to the MMM system. Agents address the transport of input and output data, providing interoperation via a standardized communication language between clients, servers and brokers.