Community Media and Service-Oriented Architecture (COMSOA)

In COMSOA we focus on basic phenomena of community media, i.e., systems that enable and support social creativity, participatory media, and distributed problem solving. This work is grounded on a properly instrumented platform that facilitates the rapid creation of community services and experimentation with them. This basis is offered by service-oriented computing (SOC), a new emerging cross-disciplinary paradigm that has risen to offer solutions to various challenges in large-scale distributed computing. The service-oriented system architecture (SOA) changes the way software applications are designed, delivered, and consumed. Services are autonomous, platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, and discovered using standard protocols and service metadata. They can be used to build networks of collaborating applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries, or closer to consumers. SOA offers high availability and bandwidth through many users’ wideband connections, and good scalability with no central servers as bottlenecks and one point of failure.

The COMSOA project studies the paradigm shift of service-oriented computing from a community-centric viewpoint. This is in contrast with the main body of research on service-oriented architectures, which mostly concentrates on potential benefits that can be achieved in technical adaptivity and replicability, business service flexibility, service life cycle management, and service discovery. This viewpoint typically pays little attention to the social behaviour of individuals and informal ad-hoc communities that are offering, subscribing and using the services on these new platforms. The term "peer-to-peer" has come to be applied to networks that expect end users to contribute their own files, computing time, or other resources to some shared project. Even more interesting than the systems' technical underpinnings are their socially disruptive potential: how in various ways they return content, choice, and control to other users.

We argue that dynamic social network analysis (SNA) and probabilistic community modelling coupled with systematic design methods, such as user-centric product concept design (UCPCD), are necessary building blocks of novel community-centric methodologies to design the architecture of future community services. This requires multi-disciplinary end-to-end research from technological platforms to various viewpoints on their implications in actual use in real world users and communities. COMSOA research will consist of (1) in-depth case studies of selected community media services, (2) development of new methods and tools for dynamic community analysis and modeling, (3) demonstration of the benefits of service-oriented computing by building extensions to service platforms being developed at HIIT, most notably to Digital Content Distribution Management System DiMaS, and (4) development of novel community-centric methodology for product and service concept design.

People

• Marko Turpeinen, project leader
• Matti Rantanen
• Tommo Reti
• Vili Lehdonvirta
• Fernando Herrera
• Herkko Hietanen

Research groups

• Digital Content Communities Dr. Marko Turpeinen, Dr. Timo Saari, Dr. Giulio Jacucci

• Ubiquitous Interaction Dr. Timo Saari, Dr. Giulio Jacucci, Prof. Martti Mäntylä

See pong.hiit.fi for further information and publications.