Data-centric collaboration for wired and wireless platforms

Abstract

With the proliferation of mobile computing devices there is an increasing demand for applications supporting collaboration among users working in the field and in the office. A key component for collaboration in this domain is sharing and manipulation of information using very different devices and communications. We propose a novel, data-centric collaboration paradigm, where each user can obtain a subset of the shared data and the data may be visualized differently for different users. The data amount and the visualization technique reflect the user's interests and/or computing and communication capabilities. The users collaborate on and exchange data, and the data is dynamically transformed to adapt to the particular computing/network platform. The resulting design is simple yet very powerful and scalable. It is implemented and tested by developing several complex groupware applications.