This report may be cited as SERC-TR-80F, Software Engineering Research Center, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, May 1996.
Research in technological fields is not fully effective until it is put into practice, but with rare exceptions researchers and practitioners live in different worlds. To bridge these worlds, the National Science Foundation has promoted the creation of Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC's) which bring together universities and industrial organizations. The Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) is one such center.
The recent growth of the World Wide Web provides additional opportunities for joint research and technology transfer through IUCRC's. To explore these opportunities, the Virtual Software Engineering Research Center (VSERC) is being created, based on process models of industry-university collaboration.
This report describes the technology transfer process model used in VSERC and the Web mechanisms that have been defined to support it. These mechanisms include a virtual office for each project, a matchmaker tool to link researchers and industry users, discussion and logging tools, virtual workrooms for specific industry-researcher interactions, and so on.