Having considered the design and preliminary implementation of a
single Collaboratory, let us now consider a more holistic view of the
MIS world using the Web as a collaborative tool. We envision that
there will be centers of collaboration which will act as gateways to
the linked repositories of MIS related information. This is shown in
Figure 6. The key idea is to maintain the distributed nature of the
Web, while avoiding excessive duplication of repositories. Since this is a
collaborative environment, there is bound to be some amount of
duplication of material by servers that wish to maintain a local copy
of a certain repository or even a just a single document. Also, if
there were to be only one central Collaboratory, there would be an
undue load on the server, to be of use to MIS academics and
professionals all over the world.
*********************Put Figure 6 about here*******************
While it may be difficult to determine an optimal repository distribution
strategy, the entire MIS Collaborative environment could be made up of
five to seven core Collaboratories distributed across the continents.
Further, depending upon usage load factors, there could be ``mirror
sites'' to replicate the same repositories and the ability to execute
similar search agents. While it is a topographical problem to
ascertain the geographical locations of these servers, the users are
not affected due to the transparent nature of access to these
Collaboratories.