A Model-based Awareness Approach for Synchronous Collaborative Sessions on the Web

Awareness describes the knowledge acquired by a member of a collaborative session about the activities of the other members of this session. This paper presents the main aspects of the development of an awareness tool based on an information-oriented coordination model for synchronous collaboration sessions. This tool is supported by an adaptive layered architecture which is based on collaborative extensions of Java language, Java 3D and XML possibilities in terms of data structuring. The application field is related to the execution of a project review for the distributed collaborative design, which is applied to a spatial-domain scenario from the European project DSE (distributed system engineering)