Cooperation Management Services for Open Cooperative Systems

A new class of systems that should appear in a next future should enable several users to lead synchronous cooperative activity by way of their computing systems. These cooperative systems should be able to operate in heterogeneous environments involved by the operating and communication environment of the user. In order to build such cooperative system it is needed to have open cooperative systems based de jure standards such as Open Distributed Processing Reference Model (ISO/ODP-RM) and on de facto standards such as OMG/CORBA. To answer this need, this paper summarises a complete analyse of open distributed cooperative systems based on standards and presents a set of open management services common to cooperative systems. Together, these services, generic enough to be reusable, build a middleware layer which, once inserted between now emerging distributed platforms and end-user applications, will enable participants to keep their favourite applications and to continue to use them during cooperative activities. They are designed using an object-based approach and to bridge the gap of users environment heterogeneity.