Intro: Technology Concepts

The majority of the discussions associated with online conferencing activities tend to be associated with decisions. Typically, the decision making process incorporates the analysis of one or more visualizations of data.

The Cooperative Web pertains to a set of technologies and associated architectures that promise to empower decision agility with respect to information available for evaluation via web-based applications. Web developers can establish rich web applications that combine application specific data with live meeting interactions between meeting attendees.

While Cooperative Web solutions can incorporate digital components (audio, video) to replicate the face-face meeting experience with the human sensory elements of sight and sound, the interactive sensory element is a differentiating factor. The core value proposition of this technology is that it provides all web meeting participants with the ability to manipulate data that is centric to the decision making process.

An Example Cooperative Web Scenario

Imagine the notion of a geo-spatial planning application whereby users can collaborate using an interactive map to make location-centric decisions. For example, consider the following scenario:

Alice and Bob join a cooperative map application session to plan a site-seeing trip. Alice adds markers for her preferred destinations. Simultaneously, Bob also enters his preferences. During the meet/discuss/decide conversation, both Alice and Bob each pickup and relocate the same marker at the same time. The application resolves the conflict and renders the same marker state for both Alice and Bob. Meanwhile, a Bot dynamically acts on behalf of Alice and Bob and keeps all markers up to date on weather for the locations of interest. This type of real-time applications with support for concurrent interactions and conflict resolution is addressed by the Cooperative Web Framework.