WWW-based collaboration environments with distributed tool services

Abstract

We have developed an architecture for a general-purpose framework for hypermedia collaboration environments that support purposeful work by orchestrated teams. The hypermedia represents all plausible multimedia artifacts concerned with the collaborative task(s) at hand that can be placed or generated on-line, from application-specific materials (e.g., source code, chip layouts, blueprints) to formal documentation to digital library resources to informal email and chat transcripts. The framework capabilities support both internal (WWW-style hypertext) and external (non-WWW open hypertext link server) links among these artifacts, which can be added incrementally as useful connections are discovereds project-specific intelligent hypermedia search and browsings automated construction of artifacts and hyperlinks according to the semantics of the group and individual tasks and the overall workflow among the taskss application of arbitrary tools to the artifactss and collaborative work for geographically dispersed teams connected by the Internet and/or an intranet/extranet. We also present a general architecture for a WWW-based distributed tool launching service compatible with our collaboration environment framework. We describe our prototype realization of the framework in OzWeb. It reuses object-oriented data management for application-specific hyperbase organization, and workflow enactment and cooperative transactions as built-in services, which were originally developed for the Oz non-hypermedia environment. The tool service is implemented by the generic Rivendell component, which has been integrated into OzWeb as an example “foreign” (i.e., add-on) service. Rivendell could alternatively be employed in a stand-alone manner. We have several months experience using an OzWeb hypermedia collaboration environment for our own continuing software development work on the system.