Request and Navigation Component for DRAGON Portal

The DRAGON project aims at the development of an Engineering Portal in order to innovatively support collaboration between dislocated business partners who have a common engineering task. Collaborations in this sense span from short term, project oriented co-operations to long term cooperations, like joint ventures. The first hurdle to take is to find adequate collaboration partners which meet the established requirements. Then a collaboration has to be agreed upon. After that, so-called virtual teams are typically established across the companies' borders who do the engineering and administrative tasks. This scenario is particularly relevant to European companies as the globalization of producer and consumer markets is rapidly advancing. In order to reach the ambitious goals of trans-national and trans-cultural cooperation and also to deliver the technological framework, numerous activities have to be defined and to be set up and implemented within the framework of DRAGON. Conception and implementation as well as the establishment of appropriate objectives are the focus of the project. This paper deals with the definition and development of the Request