Collaboration Management in DiCE

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-service (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