Exploring the use of web services for the design and implementation of innovative collaborative technologies, to appear

Abstract. This paper presents some ideas of how to use Web Services for the implementation of innovative collaborative technologies. A major goal here is the idea to build re-usable collaborative software components to foster knowledge exchange and learning. This paper describes two examples of how we used Web Services to achieve this goal. The first example we will describe implements a digital notice board with large, public displays. Here, we used web service to provide flexible data access. Web services provide the possibility to use our infrastructure with different programming languages and devices. The second example we will present is an application that enables students to construct and model experiments descriptions using a control plant-growth system, the biotube, remotely via Web Services.