SOL: A shared object toolkit for cooperative interfaces

The paper presents a user interface toolkit to support the construction of cooperative multiuser interfaces. The toolkit is based on the configuration of shared interface objects to construct cooperative interfaces. A principal focus of the toolkit is the provision of accessible facilities to manage interface configuration and tailoring. Most existing facilities to manage multiuser interfaces tend to be application specific and provide only limited tailorability for purpose built cooperative applications. In addition, the current structure of most cooperative applications fails to separate the semantics of applications from the cooperation specific semantics. In this paper we present a multiuser interface toolkit that provides management facilities in a manner which separates appropriate features of cooperative use from application semantics. This is achieved by allowing multiuser interfaces to be derived from a common shared interface constructed from shared interface objects. We would suggest that the separation of semantics in this form represents an initial identification of the re-usable cooperative interface components. INTRODUCTION The development of applications that support a number of interfaces across a community of users has played a prominent role in CSCW. Different researchers have investigated techniques and architectures to support the real time management of these interfaces. Research has focused on the development of facilities to coordinate and manage interaction across the different interfaces. In general, one of two alternative strategies have been adopted in the construction of multiuser applications, collaboration transparent or collaboration aware SOL: A shared object toolkit for cooperative interfaces 4 Collaboration transparent systems focus on allowing the large body of existing single-user applications to be used by a group of users without modification. This offers significant advantages in migrating applications to a cooperative setting. However, this is achieved at the cost of limiting the amount of control users have in managing the cooperative properties of the interface. In contrast, collaboration aware applications provide extensive facilities to allow users to both configure and control interfaces. The cost of this increased management is the need for the cooperative applications to be directly responsible for the facilities provided. This incurs a significant development cost and facilities developed tend to be specific to an application with little consideration is given to providing management and tailoring facilities across a range of applications. This is somewhat in contrast to the dominant trend in single user interface development which focuses on the identification of generally applicable user interface components (or widgets) which can …