Universal Accessible Collaboration Frameworks for Ubiquitous Computing Environments

The advances in mobile devices, wireless communication, and messaging technologies have given rise to a vast range of new services, for heterogeneous user environments. These include a collaboration service that can be accessed regardless of the nature of user devices and physical capabilities of the user. In this paper, we present an overview of our research project CAROUSEL, universal accessible collaboration frameworks. We describe two collaborative frameworks; our initial approach using a special PDA adaptor and current investigation using Web Services model. Although the two systems are functionally similar, there are differences in the degree of interoperability, scalability and reusability of the infrastructure. In Web Services case, we discuss how a rich synchronous and asynchronous collaboration environment can support virtual communications while built on top of a Web service infrastructure. We also describe the approach to universal access mechanisms in our collaborative model.