© 1993 by British Computer Society
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Collaboration Management in DiCE
1 Multimedia Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Mail Code C-0114, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA, 2 IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA
Effectiveness of managing collaborations directly impacts the productivity of a group, and can be significantly improved through computer supported tools made available by the advent of high speed networks and multimedia computer systems. In this paper, we propose a framework for characterizing the requirements of person-to-person (e.g. telephony), person-to-person (e.g., collaboration with software agents), and service-to-service collaborations (e.g., business workflow applications). The framework defines a hierarchy of three abstractions, at the lowest level of which are conferences which characterize the access rights of participants involved in a collaborative endeavor. The higher two levels are activities, which represent a collection of semantically related conferences, and collaborations, which represent temporally ordered sequences of activities. We describe the mechanisms for establishing and controlling the progress of a wide variety of multimedia collaborations. The framework for modelling collaborations and the mechanisms for their instantiation described in this paper form the basis of DiCE—a Distributed Collaborative Environment being developed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
Received October 1992.
* Current address of Harrick Vin: Multimedia Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Mail Code C-0114, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093. E-mail: vin{at}cs.ucsd.edu. This work was carried out when the author was visiting IBM T.J. Watson Research Center during the summer of 1991.
IBM T. J. Watson Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA