Major variants of the SIS architecture pattern for collective intelligence systems

Collective Intelligence Systems (CIS), such as social networking services, wikis, and media sharing platforms, access and harness the collective knowledge of connected people by providing a web-based environment to share, distribute, and retrieve topic-specific information in an efficient way. In order to design well-tailored CIS, software architects need a complete understanding about (1) architectural principles that all kinds of CIS have in common, and (2) system variants in the field. Thus to provide consolidated systematic knowledge of architectural commonalities and variations in the CIS domain, we present in this work five major pattern variants of CIS. We investigated a number of CIS in the field with focus on a detailed survey of existing variants among key architecture-significant principles based on previously identified basic concepts, principles, and characteristics of software architectures that all CIS have in common. The variants are identified along two dimensions with respect to the relationship between the key elements of artifacts and actor records across and within two layers of the system.