Lorenzo Dalvit et al.
the entity owning the centre where TeleWeaver is deployed. The owner of the centre, in turn, will pay a fixed annual licence fee to RHS. An example of an entity that can make use of the TeleWeaver business model is a municipality.
In this way, government bodies, industry organization and NGOs can use TeleWeaver as a solution to develop marginalised communities or penetrate untapped markets. For members of marginalised communities, TeleWeaver can offer a solution to local telecommunication challenges and offer opportunities for economic empowerment and entrepreneurship. These require appropriate software choices as discussed below. While not a specific characteristic of TeleWeaver per se, the embedding environment that TeleWeaver will make possible through its presence, should address the general problem of economic and technological dependency which contributes to widening the social, economic and digital divide.
3. TeleWeaver as software
TeleWeaver can be defined as an e‐service platform, which provides a middleware solution for ICT4D services. The name“ TeleWeaver” signifies the defining characteristic of the software, i. e. the inter‐weaving of different services and applications, akin to an Enterprise Service Bus( ESB). ESB is largely implemented in software development and telecommunication and offers well documented advantages( Breest 2006). These advantages include the portability of applications and services, improved workflow and a seamless user experience. Most software developed specifically for ICT4D implementations constitutes an ad hoc solution, and does not follow the ESB model. TeleWeaver ' s ESB design model is based on SOAs. SOAs are a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. To achieve this, the Open Services Gateway Initiative( OSGi) framework was selected as the core framework for TeleWeaver ' s ESB implementation. The OSGi standard also specifies a runtime infrastructure for controlling the life cycle of bundles within the execution environment as depicted in Figure 2 below. This infrastructure allows developers to dynamically add and remove existing services( Rossi 2004).
Figure 2: OSGi Framework( Ntshinga 2012)
TeleWeaver ' s SOA is based on a peer‐to‐peer( P2P) transport mechanism. The loosely coupled design of SOA best suits the heterogeneous application environment. Additionally, the P2P transport, allows us to link services that occur at different nodes, while giving each node control over the resources it offers. Nodes can thus be understood as defining boundaries of ownership of services and the resources underlying them.
TeleWeaver specialises the Equinox OSGi implementation and, as far as we could ascertain, it is the first time that a proven ESB architecture is used in ICT for ICT4D. Limitations in the deployment environment, as well as use cases that capture most common user scenarios have shaped the specialization of Equinox( Ntshinga 2012).
Resource brokering uses a variety of Java specifications and open standards. TeleWeaver is organized in the following components:
• the Core Application Components( CAC);
• the Core Service Components( CSC);
• the User Application Component( UAC);
• the Core Data Components( CDC);
155