An Implementation Model for Collaborative Applications

A major challenge in building groupware systems is to provide support for control and coordination of users actions on shared resources. This support includes the maintenance of the current state of the collaborative multi-user environment such as control of group interaction rules and coordination of users actions or tasks. We propose an extension of the visual presentation/underlying data model currently followed when developing interactive single user applications. We claim that groupware systems require two additional components: user-related data and group interaction rules. The former component maintains information about active users, their roles, and privileges. While the latter keeps the state of the current collaborative environment to control and coordinate user actions. Furthermore, our approach allows developers build each system component separately, promoting the decomposition of the application’s computational objects and its collaborative environment specification.