Building Collaborative Problem-Solving Environments as Shared Places

Shared Place technology allows construction of virtual places on the Web by merging collaborative tools with Web page content. It offers significant benefits to the Collaborative Problem-Solving Environments’ developers and users. By its support for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration it facilitates the exchange of ideas among remote users. Extensive customization is possible; different Places can be generated from the same set of components depending on user preferences, tasks to be performed and available resources. Moreover, it enables integration of problem-specific tools with virtual place content. The paper explains how these features are achieved in Shared Place using Internet technologies and standards. Also, the process of development of a collaborative component is presented with focus on the use of the Shared Place services. Finally, the construction process of a virtual place is described with emphasis on the customization of tools’ behavior and on the integration of the collaborative components with Web resources.