This paper presents a platform that integrates cooperation facilities for the most important types of interaction. These include explicit informal human interaction by speech and gestures and implicit semi-formal human interaction referring to an object of common interest. Furthermore, human - application interaction and inter-application interaction is facilitated by agentification of the involved software components utilizing techniques from distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). Particularly, interaction between humans and applications requires specific components referred to as user agents.
Cooperation-Ware is a framework for integrating software components supporting all of the above types of communication. It includes audio/video conferencing and tele-pointing, data and application sharing, and agents as well as user agents. The functionality is based on a formal model specifying cooperative actions executed by humans or agents. The Cooperation-Ware framework provides a user interface with an overall interaction methodology based on a room metaphor. The architecture relies on the client-server concept supporting synchronous, asynchronous, and autonomous cooperative work.
previous - top - next