Community Computing - Advanced Design Approaches to Emerging Software Systems - page 199

Figure 1. The overview of community computing

3. Society: It is a metaphor to abstract a com-
munity computing system and is constructed
by members and communities.
4. Community: It is a metaphor to abstract
a proactive organization that comprises
members cooperating with others to achieve
particular goals. A community has goals,
necessary roles, and information about
cooperation and role-member binding. A
community is able to have more than one
goal, and those goals are able to be issued
in parallel. To abstract communities, we
describe community types, and a community
instance is dynamically created according to
the associated community type in execution
time.
5. Role: It is a well-defined position in a com-
munity with an associated set of expected
behaviors (Ferber, 2003). A role represents
a particular capability necessary to achieve
a community's goals. The capability of a
role is presented by attributes and actions
of the role.

6. Cooperation: It is a cooperative interaction
among members who take a particular role
in a community.
7. Member: It is a metaphor to abstract a
pervasive object belonging to a commu-
nity computing system. In our community
computing, the members are restricted to
agents having their own context, capability,
and intelligence. If necessary, a member
is able to play a role within a community.
Sometimes, it can take several roles in more
than one community simultaneously.
8. Role-member binding: In order to create
a community instance, we need to find the
most proper members for each role. This
process is called role-member binding.

Community

Community is the most essential concept in
community computing. To help understand the
community concept, we introduce the types of
community and the life cycle. The pervasive
services have different levels of difficulty. Some