AGORA: a Cooperative Services-based Architecture for Groupware Environments

Groupware systems are closely related with factors which define organization and knowledge of the group. Taking into account these factors are very variable, development and management processes of these systems are complex and need adaptable infrastructure which guarantees their correct evolution. From this need, we propose AGORA as a layered architecture for building flexible cooperative applications in distributed environments. This approach is based on a shared workspace which defines basic resources for groupware systems. This way, a system is responsible to build their services from a specific cooperative operations supplied by AGORA of which functional model is based on components reutilization.