Supporting cooperation with off-the-shelf applications in wired and wireless networks

This paper presents a cooperative platform that allows the sharing of information as well as the interactive use of different kinds of application in a synchronous mode. The access to the collaborative sessions is possible from different kinds of terminal and network (fixed or mobile). In particular, we address Web users and mobile users with sufficient bandwidth. The platform is based on the centralised sharing of an off-the-shelf application that relies on a collaborative version of the graphics libraries used in Java and Microsoft Windows. A first prototype of the platform has been experimented by Ph.D. students during a seminar distributed across Italy.