The ACTIVE technical architecture will follow the same patterns as most of the established Web 2.0 solutions.
The basic infrastructure will be accommodated by the Web server for presentation, application server for business logic and backend database server, composing the ACTIVE Server. Here an enterprise can centrally maintain all ACTIVE users, their profiles, contexts, identified processes etc.
User interaction can be achieved through standard server-side Web access or through AJAX. However, knowledge workers heavily depend on the desktop-oriented personal productivity tools, so this has to be taken into account while defining the ACTIVE architecture, too.
ACTIVE will use the concept of ACTIVE Knowledge Workspace Desktop to cover the configurations with PIM tools running on a desktop and other standard software. Each software tool (either desktop or web-based) that would benefit from ACTIVE Knowledge Workspace has to be ACTIVated.
Being ACTIVated means to enable the passing of information created by the desktop application to the ACTIVE software for subsequent processing, for what it has to:

(i)    Be enhanced to support the bi-directional communication with the Workspace

(ii)    Accommodate enhanced functionality enabled by ACTIVE metadata like context etc

(iii)    And accommodate ACTIVE filters which are needed to collect the information and data flows from the tool and deliver this information to backed ACTIVE servers for processing.

The overall ACTIVE software architecture is shown in the figure below.

Possible desktop candidates for the ACTIVation:

• Microsoft Outlook 2007
• IE,
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Desktop Search

Home-grown applications that could be ACTIVated:

 

• Cadence standard tools Encounter, Virtuoso and Incisive-Platform
• Accenture tool Fast search engine with flex frontend

Three types of software tools will be integrated into the ACTIVE environment:

• off-the-shelf desktop PIM tools
• existing server-based/web-based tools like e.g. the existing knowledge management system in the Accenture case study
• newly developed tools for knowledge structure management, collaborative system modelling and process management