AGORA: a Layered Architecture for Cooperative Work Environments

Groupware systems are closely related with factors which define organization and knowledge of the group. Considering these factors are very variable, development and management processes of groupware systems are complex and require adaptable infrastructure which guarantees their 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 specific cooperative operations supplied by AGORA through a functional model based on components reutilization.