ACE: Application toolkit for Collaborative Environments

Collaborative, integrated information environments are a powerful way to connect teams and allow them to share diverse sources of information. Teams equipped with such an environment have the power to jointly analyze data contained in integrated legacysystems, despite lack of interoperability among the systems. Collaborative features such as threaded discussions, document sharing, and linked issues and action items close the gap between analysis and action. Yet the complexity of such environmentsrequires specialized software engineering resources to deploy new applications that capitalize on the integrated information.Modus Operandi proposes an Application toolkit for Collaborative Environments (ACE) to rapidly build and deploy new applications. The ACE toolkit is an extension of our proven Wide Area Virtual Environment (WAVE) assets. WAVE provides a collaborationenvironment on top of a virtual object-oriented model of information integrated data sources. The ACE toolkit captures specialized software engineering knowledge with innovative domain-independent application patterns. Built-in safety net featuresminimize the risk of disrupting the team when new applications are added. ACE will target application patterns that are of value to decision support and homeland security domains. ACE benefits the Air Force by providing an approach to informationintegration that is well suited to geographically distributed teams that need to share information from diverse data sources. It can be deployed more quickly, and with lower risk, than solutions that require teams to adopt a whole new set of applications,or that force data into a single repository. With the ACE toolkit, applications that provide teams with the power to analyze integrated information can be rapidly customized to the team's needs and deployed quickly.Commercial applications of ACE in the Integrated Workgroup Solutions market include collaborative systems engineering by multi-contractor teams, and contract performance management with metrics from integrated enterprise data sources In the federalmarketplace, ACE technologies can be used to enable sharing of information from diverse multi-agency legacy data sources for homeland security.