A Distributed Model and Architecture for Interactive Cooperation

Cooperation systems are intrinsically related with user interface systems. The design and implementation of a framework to support the construction of interactive and cooperative applications must be a consistent extension of the models and architectures of single user applications. The requirements for this extension include the management of the communication and coordination between users, the support for several levels of feedback (feedback about machine activities, individual user activities and group activities), the handling of the synchronisation issues. This paper describes a distributed cooperation system based on a user interface toolkit and an interactive construction tool. The toolkit and tool were extended to enable communication, data sharing and coordination among several interacting users.