SBIR-STTR Award

The goal of the proposed effort is to develop a collaboration environment to support real time collaborative activities and distributed synchronous work space and object manipulation across a wide range of heterogeneous platforms. The proposed virtual collaboration environment (VCE) incorporates the collaboration capabilities into distributed inter module interactions, communications, media formats, and object manipulations in a platform independent fashion. The proposed system will also provide a very efficient API to the application tool developers such that detailed knowledge of the VCE and the heterogeneous underlying hardware and software architectures is hidden from users. Thus, for any collaboration developer, the development of an application collaboration system can be as simple as developing a conventional non collaboration system. For example, the API should provide a collaborative synchronous message passing interface, which will provide an API to users in the same way as that of a conventional MPI, while the capability of collaboration will be incorporated automatically. A high level collaborative application development language (CADL) will also be developed such that a sophisticated collaborative application system can be easily completed by writing less than 20 lines of CADL code or using a very simple drag and drop graphic tool, and be completed in 30 minutes.

Keywords:
collaborative environments collaborative tools distributed systems

The goal of the proposed effort is to develop a collaboration environment to support real-time collaborative activities and distributed synchronous work space and object manipulation. A major challenge in designing such a distributed multimedia collaboration system is how to integrate information that has been created by stand-alone tools and applications, for use by stand-alone tools and applications, into the collaborative environment without loss of presentation quality and information manipulation functionality. Existing systems provide either the necessary features to incorporate existing applications using display broadcasting or use the less expensive event broadcasting scheme to implement a platform to develop new collaborative applications. In contrast, the objective of the proposed effort is to develop a platform that can incorporate commercially available tools and applications into a collaborative environment, using the less expensive scheme of event broadcasting. This innovative approach would provide the benefit of incorporating existing standalone applications with acceptable response times to user requests. Moreover, the platform will implement a powerful inter-object relationship model, in order to integrate the different components together. The platform will include tools to create a collaborative session, to initiate it, and to facilitate and control its execution. It will also include the necessary features to record and interactively playback a session.

Keywords:
com based systems real-time mechanisms distributed systems collaborative tools collaborative enviro