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Over the last two years, we have built a web-based collaborative system TangoInteractive (http://www.webwisdom.com) which has been very successfully used for synchronous distance education. Key features of TangoInteractive were its well defined API to applications in any language and its powerful shared browser built around a JavaScript Interface. XML offers at least two important opportunities to advance this technology. Firstly the current shared HTML browser becomes a shared XML browser allowing custom style sheets on each collaborating client to present different views to each user. We are exploring this for distance education as a mechanism for universal access for both students and teachers of different capabilities and to support sessions where clients could simultaneously be PC's, palmtop and high end virtual environments such as CAVE's. A second area where XML will play a key role is as the infrastructure with which to build collaborative web pages containing many different shared objects with both different functionalities and different collaboration configurations. In this talk we describe our prototype SPW (Shared Places on the Web) which we are building to explore both these ideas. The dynamic customizable configuration possibilities offered by this architecture, appears a dramatic improvement over current collaborative models which tend to offer rather rigid collaboration capabilities and policies.
Our Shared Place is a virtual place on the Web where people can meet and work together. They can use provided content and tools for collaborative work. They can bring their own content and share it with others. They can possibly create new content and take it with them to another Shared Place or store it on local disk for standalone work. From the user's point of view, the Shared Place is an ordinary Web page with added collaboration functionality.
The Shared Place technology has several architectural components. First of all, the Shared Place Definition Language (SPDL) is an XML based language for defining properties of the Shared Places. SPDL describes all aspects of the the environment including collaboration functionality, shared object structure and user related configuration data. This information includes session management and synchronization information; object initial state and persistence as well as communities and security. The Shared Tool is a piece of software that can be embedded as a part of a Web page content and offers collaboration functionality using mechanisms provided by the Shared Place Framework. To interact with the Shared Place Framework, the Shared Tools must implement the Shared Place interface that can be in form of Java applet, plug-in, ActiveX object, or JavaScript applications. Shared Place Framework is a set of mechanisms that implement collaboration services and expose them to Shared Tools using Shared Place interfaces. The Shared Place Framework will be implement in terms of existing Java based TangoInteractive infrastructure but linking the much richer SPDL based web pages.