A Portal for Ubiquitous Collaboration

This paper presents a software framework, called Collaborator, to provide a shared work-space supporting the activities of virtual teams. This system exploits seamless integration of standard Web technologies with agent technologies, enhancing the classic Web communication mechanisms to support synchronous sharing of applications, and its use through emerging technologies such as: third generation of mobile networks and terminals, and new generation of home appliances. The system presented in the paper is the main result of an on-going European research project Collaborator (IST-2000-30045) that aims at specifying and developing a software distributed environment to support efficient synchronous collaborative work between virtual teams, and experiment such an environment in the construction and telecommunication working sectors