The ICIS Architectures cluster is concerned with investigating architecture and infrastructure needs for building Interactive Collaborative Information Systems. Emphasis is on support for the basic building block of these systems: agents, human as well as automated. The basic characteristics of agents that will direct research of supporting infrastructure are:

• agents generally operate in dynamic, open environments;
• they are mutually self-configuring, mobile, and adaptive to environmental changes;
• information about objectives, resources and their environment is available at a semantic level.

Recent years have seen the emergence of grid technology. The basic idea of a grid is to dynamically share resources in networked environments, ranging from local networks to the global Internet. Resources that can be shared within a grid include data, computing resources, network links, but also (scientific) instruments and sensors, and even human expertise. Often grid solutions are based on peer-to-peer communication technology, which make them flexible in changing network environments, scale to large numbers of resources and participants, and operate efficiently when dealing with large amounts of data and computational power.

A recent development in networked decentralized cooperative decision making systems is the application of agent-based architectures, where agents are intelligent processes that process data by semantic content. The awareness of semantics in networked data processing has recently become the main research push around the development of the semantic web technology by DARPA and the W3C consortium.

Information security for collaborative information systems is quickly gaining importance. This encompasses the protection of the Confidentiality, the Integrity, and the Availability (CIA) of information, processes and (sub-) systems as well as the identification and authentication of those objects and the access rights. Though traditional security solutions are applicable for ICIS too, specific security issues exist in real time information management and in relation with dynamic agent-based systems that need to be addressed.

The work is organized in a number of research domains. These are:

Service Grids
Enhancing services offered by grids by integrating architectural principles, investigating principles and methods of performance management and designing mechanisms for supporting integrated services by autonomous players.

Data Grids
To be useful for applications in multi-agent based systems, current grid technology needs to be extended to provide special built in features like dynamical (re)configuration of systems and communication between heterogeneous systems.

Semantic Web Technology
Recent developments in networked decentralized cooperative decision making systems include the application of agent-based architectures, where agents are intelligent processes that process data by semantic content. The awareness of semantics in networked data processing has recently become the main research push around the development of the semantic web technology by W3C.

Information Bound Security
When information is physically forwarded, as opposed to be located in a secure data base, traditional security solutions sacrifice the granularityof protection by protecting everything in the information channel at the same level. Information Bound Security aims at finding strategies and technologies to apply a fine-grained security policy that secures individual items of data-space elements taking into account the accessing entities as well as the data space infrastructure.

For more information about CHIM research, we refer to the ICIS-A projects and publications.