Social Software links social entities on the Internet. With this term we label new communication and collaboration media like wikis, blogs, social bookmarking but also traditional media supporting communities of practice. Scientific and professional communities challenge information systems engineering with high demands on traceable and secured collaboration and processing of scientific data. Flexibility, adaptation, interoperability are only a few requirements to mention.

With the advent of international standards XML-based standards like MPEG-7 for the handling of complex multimedia metadata and service oriented architectures engineers and community facilitators can create more generic services for the many communities with diverse but professional needs. Therefore, communities have to be incorporated in the community information systems engineering process.

In the talk we present a new reflective information system architecture called ATLAS offering self observation mechanisms for the establishment of a community-centered learning and improvement process for social software.