A Framework for Synchronous and Ubiquitous Collaboration

With the advance of a variety of software/hardware technologies and wireless networking, there is coming a need for ubiquitous collaboration which allows people to access information systems independent of their access device and their physical capabilities and to communicate with other people in anytime and anywhere. Also, with the maturity of evolving computing paradigms and collaborative applications, a workspace for working together is being expanded from locally collocated physical place to geographically dispersed virtual place. Current virtual conferencing systems are not suitable for building integrated collaboration systems to work together in the same collaboration session. They also lack support for ubiquitous collaboration. As the number of collaborators with a large number of disparate access devices increases, the difficulties for protecting secured resources from unauthorized users as well as unsecured access devices will increase since the resources can be compromised by inadequately secured human and devices. Collaboration generally includes sharing resources. Mechanisms for dealing with consistency in application shared among collaborators will have to be considered in an unambiguous manner. In this dissertation we address a number of issues related in building a framework for synchronous and ubiquitous collaboration as well as heterogeneous community collaboration. First, to make ubiquitous collaboration more promising, we present a framework built on heterogeneous (wire, wireless) computing environment. Second, to provide a generic solution for controlling sessions and participants’ presences in heterogeneous community collaboration, we present a set of session protocols defined in