Trading services in open distributed environments
Lea Kutvonen · 1998
The current development of computing and telecommunication environments aims towards interoperability across separate platforms and organisations in a world-wide fashion. Interoperability means that software components can be exploited from arbitrary computers in such a way that the service semantics is preserved. The mechanisms supporting interoperability at the application level must mask heterogeneity of the compound computing environment. The term `open distributed processing' does not currently have a single, commonly accepted interpretation. Therefore, the main system architecture models are critically analysed in order to contrast the facilities for interoperation in each model. The focus of this dissertation is on the problems arising when the interoperating computing systems are controlled by autonomous organisations, i.e., problems of federated systems. Federations between sovereign systems involve exploitation of open interfaces and run-time information about the system fa...