Tool Coordination and Media Integration on Asynchronously-shared Computer-supported Workspaces

This paper presents a novel and exible architecture to support the collaboration paradigm for asynchronous sharing of computer-supported workspaces, or simply replayable workspaces. Such workspace, however, may be composed of multiple, interacting, tools. Through the capture, re-execution, and manipulation of a session with an interactive computer-supported workspace, it is possible to reuse the process of how a task was performed, (i.e., valuable collaborative information). Under our paradigm, a user session with a computer-supported workspace is encapsulated into a data artifact, referred to as a session object. The session object can be then manipulated through Vcr-like controls. The session object is an active object, composed of heterogeneous media streams that represent input sequences to various tools of the workspace. Our computer-supported workspace is made-up of modular components that provide transparent management of their heterogeneous media. Such media may have or lack time-variance, periodicity, and statefulness. The architecture provides ne-grained integration of such heterogeneous media, while providing exible support for coordinating the various tools found in a computer-supported workspace.