Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, 1998. (WET ICE '98) Proceedings., Seventh IEEE International Workshops on

Companies that operate in extremely volatile markets are often confronted with the challenge of a very narrow window of opportunity for developing and commercializing new products. Not only must these companies have a very short time-to-market, but they must also utilize all available information to create and maintain a competitive advantage. Today, success in gaining and maintaining a competitiv... View full abstract»

With the current proliferation of the net based infrastructure, electronic commerce is becoming more and more a type of collaborative work. Net persistent objects can be created and used. We provide a proposal for an architecture where participants (partners) are able to create, work with and store objects on the net. They are enabled to define partner specific business rules with respect to a wel... View full abstract»

We describe our concept of an active Web, namely how we design the software architecture of interactive cooperative applications based on the WWW. An active Web includes agents able to use the services offered by WWW clients and servers. In an active Web, both users and agents can interoperate using a set of basic services for communication and synchronization. The active Web we describe here is b... View full abstract»

The paper argues that MUDs (multi-user domains) and the Web have complementary strengths, and that limiting our support of collaboration to either one by itself is simply wrong. The Web is about sharing artifacts, passing them around, and sometimes working together on them simultaneously. The MUDs are about shared presence, with people interacting with each other and their tools, in a common envir... View full abstract»

Applications for computer supported cooperative work can gain from component models and frameworks. The framework for “questionnaires”, which is described in the paper offers a pattern to distribute artifacts to a group of receivers. We use mobile code to ensure highest flexibility and provide hooks to be able to collaborate with local applications on the receiver side. The questionnai... View full abstract»

Mobile agents are processes which can migrate and execute on new hosts. Mobility is a key concept for network programming; it has stimulated much research about new programming languages and paradigms. X-KLAIM is an experimental programming language, inspired by the Linda paradigm, where mobile agents and their interaction strategies can be naturally programmed. A prototype implementation of X-KLA... View full abstract»

Most approaches to real time collaboration and awareness involve the use of special applications to connect users to each other either peer-to-peer or via a central server. At Lotus we have built a toolkit of small components-Java applets based on NSTP-that can be embedded in Web pages or Lotus Notes documents. While each small component incorporates just one aspect of collaboration, they can be w... View full abstract»

The World Wide Web has become an established platform for the development of various types of applications, including those in the area of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). The Web provides a common infrastructure for building easily accessible applications, but these still suffer from inherent shortcomings of the underlying Web technology. We describe the BSCW shared workspace system, a... View full abstract»

This report of the working group summarizes the discussions and the common understanding of the active participants of the workshop. The goal of this workshop was to bring together leading researchers with different scientific backgrounds and different understandings of what the most interesting aspects or problems in the area of collaboration are, and to develop a broadening understanding of what... View full abstract»

The paper presents a technique, called interaction oriented programming (IOP), which facilitates the design of large reactive systems. IOP is based on the assumption that it is better to separate the coordination of the components from the components itself, making coordination patterns explicit. This contrasts with the usual practice, in which the coordination is directly handled inside the compo... View full abstract»

The paper surveys the possible coordination models for mobile agent applications and evaluates them in the context of a widely distributed application in the area of WWW information retrieval. The analysis outlines the advantages and the drawbacks of each coordination model and shows how reactivity of the coordination media can provide the degree of flexibility and adaptability required by mobile ... View full abstract»

Organizations of today are typically composed of distributed teams which require rapid and dynamic grouping and re-grouping as well as rapid access to distributed data and people. This mobile task force brings about a need for people and teams to collaborate anytime, any place, whether at their offices, home or on the road. Better mechanisms and infrastructure for conducting small and large scale ... View full abstract»

Intelligence, collaboration and mobility are the main important features in designing agents for electronic commercial systems. But very few systems permit to implement agents which have all these characteristics. The authors address the problems of designing intelligent collaborative mobile agents. They propose a componential approach for designing and implementing such agents. The framework arch... View full abstract»

Difficulties with Web based full text information retrieval (IR) systems include spurious matches, manually intensive document sifting, and the absence of communication or coordination between users. To address these difficulties, we introduce the Annotate! system which enables document annotations, and captures global usage history. Annotate! provides improved data and metadata clues to guide the... View full abstract»

Although work processes, like software processes, include a number of process aspects such as defined phases and deadlines, they are not plannable in detail. However the advantages of today's process management, such as effective document routing and timeliness, can only be achieved with detailed models of work processes. The paper suggests a concept that uses detailed process models in conjunctio... View full abstract»

We have developed an environment in which real-world collaborative working (RWCW) and computer-supported collaborative working (CSCW) can be seamlessly integrated. Real-world collaboration usually involves mobile individuals in casual or pre-arranged meetings with colleagues. On the other hand computer-supported collaboration involves using computer-based tools to cooperate, e.g. multimedia confer... View full abstract»

The authors present DigiSafe-a secure and reliable system for public or corporation users to store and retrieve valuable digital data over untrusted networks. It is the electronic analogy to the physical safe boxes provided by a bank whereby customers keep their valuable belongings. DigiSafe follows a typical client/server model where online digital data depository services are provided by a servi... View full abstract»

With GroupOrga (Groupware Based Organization Design), we present a “thinkable” application environment and framework for distributed and collaborative organization design. The relationship between collaboration and organization structure is touched by addressing the question of how people in an organization can collaboratively design constantly evolving organization structures. After s... View full abstract»

Loosely structured Web-based collections and more highly structured database resources have value to the extent that they convey meaning, understanding, and usable information. Metadata, or `data about data' is the means of conveying this meaning, and thus it is an essential ingredient for successful collaboration involving diverse and distributed information. We characterize three dimensions of m... View full abstract»

The paper presents an approach to coordination based upon concurrent interpretation of scripts among agents that adopt various roles in cooperative problem solving tasks. The authors introduce an associated role-based coordination language called TRUCE that can be used for writing protocol scripts and which implements the approach View full abstract»