Autonomous services for a collaborative design environment

In the near future every person, independent of geographical location, will have some sort of network computing capability, either by means of conventional desktop computing or through mobile devices. This not only means that geographically distributed users will be able to easily communicate, but also collaborate i.e. share multimedia documents and applications. Web services have introduced a new paradigm for platform-independent computing. As a result, it is very attractive to use these modular services to design multimedia collaboration systems for the Internet. Today there are many individual services being developed using the Web services paradigm. However, these services are rarely collaborative or asynchronous in nature. This paper presents the design and architecture of a dynamic collaboration framework. The system supports the integration of collaboration-aware and unaware services. To demonstrate the feasibility of our novel approach, we have successfully integrated sample services into a Web based collaborative desktop environment for electronic design automation (EDA) teams.