WWG: A Wide-Area Infrastructure to Support Groups

Abstract

Group learning at Internet scale is becoming more frequent in university courses. This complex process requires support by distributed computing learning support infrastructures.This paper describes the design of WWG (World-Wide Groups): a distributed and decentralized infrastructure with the aim of supporting distributed group learning and team work, centered on the distribution of events, so that every participant can be notified and thus be aware of the actions, changes, progress of the groups he belongs to.The design issues, requirements and the resulting architecture are presented. WWG is based on a multi-component architecture where metainformation agents are responsible for helping the events to reach the members of the group; the repository agents are responsible for the storage of group information; and user agents are responsible for the representation of users (sources and sinks of events). In this paper we tried to show that, applying events transformation policies, WWG is scalable at group level.