A distributed model and architecture for interactive cooperation

Cooperative systems are intrinsically related to user interface systems. The design and implementation of a framework to support the construction of interactive and cooperative applications must consistently extend the models and architectures of single-user applications. The requirements for this extension include the management of the communication and coordination between users, the support for several levels of feedback (feedback about machine activities, individual user activities, and group activities), and the handling of the synchronization issues. The authors describe a distributed cooperation system based on a user interface toolkit and an interactive construction tool. The toolkit and tool were extended to enable communication data sharing, and coordination among several interacting users.<
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