PSI: a platform for shared interaction

This paper presents an infrastructure to support the dynamic sharing of information across a range of cooperative environments. The infrastructure builds upon the use of shared common spaces by using a distributed tuple space to provide information sharing at its base level. The platform extends existing considerations of tuple spaces by adding mechanisms to provide active support for sharing data elements. The use of a tuple space moves away from previous models of distribution in cooperative systems that focus on the propagation of events to focus on active data sharing. The use of data tuples allows the sharing of information to be independent of the information model allowing a wide range of applications and environments to be supported. The paper presents the infrastructure and shows how it can be used to support information sharing across a number of different forms of cooperative system and application.