Collaboration@work 2020: Ubiquitous Collaboration Research Perspectives

In 2020 Collaborative Working Environments will be based on collaborative systems including both general collaborative infrastructures and specific applications for supporting human-centric ubiquitous collaboration. Ubiquitous collaboration (UC) means the use of collaboration services at any stage of our work activities. UC will make possible to collaborate with anyone, at any place, at any moment as an evolution of current web 2.0 waves. UC will be achieved after research on 3 major components: contextual collaboration, mobile collaboration, and integrated collaboration. UC will require a collaborative infrastructure as the foundation of future collaborative systems for seamless collaboration among people working together. Collaborative infrastructures will offer seamlessly integrated context-aware flexible support for distributed collaboration among individuals and will draw on service-oriented reference models for massive semantic collaboration. Collaborative infrastructures will provide proactive support for pervasive human collaboration within their own organisations, with other organisations and with virtual communities of experts and of practice. Collaborative infrastructure will provide system components that comply with the Service Oriented Architectures allowing specific applications for group-driven composition of systems components to support synchronous and asynchronous teamwork freeing users from routine to focus on creativity with an effective use of distributed knowledge and competences. Converged networks and services, context modelling and reasoning, utility-like ICT, high-level middleware (upperware) and P2P infrastructures will be part of the collaborative infrastructure needed for Collaborative systems for pervasive collaboration that offers enhanced knowledge sharing mechanisms, better decision making process and less burdensome group processes support in distributed, global networks of collaborators.