The POPEYE project addresses P2P collaboration for wireless ad hoc groups, where fixed infrastructure is not a prerequisite, where virtual communities can emerge spontaneously and share data with the appropriate quality of service (persistence, synchronisation, security, …).

The vision adopted in POPEYE thus included:

Opportunistic ad hoc networking: meet and join

• enable creative usage of networked portable devices
• without the need of supporting infrastructure

Spontaneous networks: set-up working groups quickly and easily

• dependable and secure,
• context-aware,
• user personalized,
• suitable for professional and leisure usage.

Next generation collaborative systems will offer mobile users seamless and natural collaboration amongst a diversity of agents within distributed, knowledge-rich and virtualized working environments. However this ambitious goal needs to face numerous challenges from the underlying communication infrastructure through to the high level application services which, depending on the operational need to address, can receive different answers both technological and scientific.

Although useful and increasingly put into regular use, current Collaborative Working Environment (CWE) solutions have several limitations and relevant needs for further research. Most systems address either rather traditional and rigid intra-organizational collaboration scenarios or, at the opposite, completely free and unstructured open communities’ interactions. Emerging dynamic, more flexible and ad-hoc collaboration schemes are hardly or not supported at all. Typically, explicit representation of the collaboration context, of workers’ and team’s goals and the semantics of underlying business process are not addressed, and this makes difficult to ensure the context and process awareness, personalisation and collaboration support required in knowledge-rich interactions.

The POPEYE project addresses P2P collaboration for wireless ad hoc groups, where fixed infrastructure is not a prerequisite, where virtual communities can emerge spontaneously and share data with the appropriate quality of service (persistence, synchronisation, security, …).