An Object Model for Collaborative Systems and a Toolkit to Support Collaborative Activities

The goal of a collaborative system is to provide a platform for group discussion so that the ideas of the majority can be captured and categorized. Such a platform would incorporate functionality to allow a group of experts to thoroughly explore and analyze a problem domain by following a discourse structure they could design, maintain and evolve as the knowledge structure for that particular domain. However, there are very few practical tools in current systems to support coordination strategy such as voting and scaling, and collaborative model building for learning. Any practical tool is better than an excellent theory. Our recent work is to design and implement a toolkit for collaboration. This toolkit supports the general tools for collaborative activities, and is easily accessed on the Web. In this paper, we first illustrate the object model for collaborative systems; then, we discuss the basic requirements for collaborative systems that should be supported in the toolkit. The key problems of collaborative systems are also analyzed. Our proposal solution is to provide a collaborative toolkit. At last, we give the descriptions of this toolkit.