Computer supported cooperative work covers a very large application domain ranging from mail systems, to chat programs, and on to desktop sharing, multimedia conferencing, and virtual communities. we distinguish between the applications, which implement all these user-accessible services, and the underlying technology that supports and enables them. In all cases, these are applications, which provide collaboration among people who use end-user clients. Nevertheless, collaboration may also involve computer programs, or “agents”, which participate just like people. We are not interested in collaboration among computer programs, which is geared towards solving computational or business problems in a distributive manner. Our goal is to seek a comprehensive set of terms that can serve as an acceptable taxonomy for this application area. As common in advanced software design methodologies such as UML, this taxonomy can serve as a basic foundation analysis of the problem domain. The architecture that can be thus defined will support a family of applications to span the corporate boundaries and on to intra-organizational collaboration.
By: Uri Shani
Published in: H-0220 in 2004
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