Illuminating data sources as founts of agent based collaboration

Recent advances in the field of agent collaboration have resulted in new Web-services offerings and have also re-igniting efforts to develop true collaborative virtual environments (CVE). Central to all collaborative offerings, both academic and commercial, is the sharing of information and to a lesser degree objects. What we believe has not been properly accounted for, is that useful objects exist outside the scope of these collaborative environments as well. A subset of these, remote sensing images, can directly serve as collaboration starting points. In this paper, we propose to develop the concept of a "collaboration beacon" - an agent based mechanism used to initiate and maintain data-centric collaboration. Through an application of agent and data-hiding technologies, we intend to probe the efficacy of leveraging data as collaboration initiators. To advance the longer-term goal of achieving interoperability with CVEs, we briefly explore a mechanism to provide interaction with these external agents.