Internet-Based Coordination Environments and Document-Based Applications: a Case Study

Abstract

In this paper we discuss a solution to the conference management problem, a case study in designing a groupware application distributed over the WWW. The case study requires supporting the coordination of activities of people engaged in reviewing and selecting papers submitted for a scientific conference. We discuss why such an application is interesting and describe how we designed its software architecture. The architecture we suggest implements what we call an active Web, because it includes agents able to use services offered by WWW infrastructures. A special kind of agents are active documents, which are documents that carry both some content and some code able to manipulate such a content. Users, agents, and active documents can interoperate using a set of basic services for communication and synchronization. The active Web implementation we describe here is based on coordination technology integrated with Java.