A Cooperative Visual Hypermedia Approach to Planning and Conducting Virtual Meetings

Most distributed meeting support systems focus on meeting management and audio/video communication mechanisms. They provide little support for a flexible meeting process and a shared information space with structure-rich visual artifacts. In this work, a cooperative visual hypermedia system is developed to provide visual hypermedia artifacts for team members to manipulate in a distributed meeting. The visual hypermedia system is a hypermedia-based drawing system that integrates visual hypermedia artifacts and structures found in multiple hypertext domains. In addition, the visual hypermedia is integrated with process support for flexible meeting control and for easy setup of audio/video and application sharing communication channels. A use cases is presented, which shows that using the cooperative visual hypermedia, distributed teams can perform many kinds of meetings, in the meantime, enjoying dedicated support for the planning, control, information management, and follow-up activities of a distributed meeting.