A formal basis for structured multimedia collaborations

A formal basis for multimedia collaborations is proposed. The formal basis establishes a precise mathematical framework for supporting a wide spectrum of structured collaborative tasks, ranging from sample meetings and conferences to classrooms and examinations, and from corporate negotiations, work flow tasks, and team design endeavours to courtroom hearings. We mechanize three levels of abstraction: streams at the lowest level, for media communication, sessions at the next level, which represent collections of semantically related media streams, and conferences, which represent temporally related sequences of sessions. The mathematical framework has been mechanized in Prototype Verification System from SRI International. The mechanization allows us to experiment with different formal models, and reason about properties of multimedia collaborations efficiently.