Ubiquitous Collaboration Expert Group

Presentation of the (former) Experts Group

The Expert Group on collaborative working environments set up jointly by the European Commission (EC) and European Space Agency (ESA) met for the first time in Brussels on May 4th 2004. The Expert Group discussed on the vision of next generation Collaborative Working Environments (NGCWE), the characteristics of the "upper layer" collaboration at work middleware required for realizing this vision, and the RTD challenges that need to be tackled with at European level to achieve the objectives defined. The results of the discussions are included in their first report, Report on Next Generation Collaborative Working Environments (.pdf, 170 KB)

The vision drawn by the Expert Group was that "Next Generation Collaborative Working Environments will deliver quality of experience to co-workers, and will be based on flexible services components and customized to different communities. A suitable "upper layer" collaboration at work middleware for NGCWE is required and will be a Mediator and Facilitator."

The realization of this vision requires an "upper layer" collaboration at work middleware, which will provide specific services for collaboration at work combining the basic services provided by different platforms, middleware and architectures. The "upper layer" middleware implementation should reflect an open architecture to allow interworking and interoperability among different middleware and platforms.

Finally, the experts identified RTD challenges in 9 areas in order to achieve the objectives mentioned above. The identified RTD challenges lay on the areas of: reference architecture for collaboration at work; ontologies for collaboration at work; plug&play-interoperable collaboration at work service architecture; smooth "upper layer" collaboration at work middleware interaction with underlying layers; interaction among peers (robots, systems and workers); utility-like computing capacity and connectivity for co-workers; contextualization and content for collaboration at work services; group-level security, traceability, privacy and trust; and co-workers mobility.

The Expert Group decided to go on its work and start working on validating application scenarios to illustrate the vision of NGCWE.

That is why during their second meeting in September 2004 in Brussels they tackled the subjects of:

a) defining a template to be used for describing the scenarios

b) selecting the domains on which the scenarios will be worked out

c) assigning expert for each scenario, and

d) the kick-off of the development of the selected application scenarios.

The first results (scenarios) are listed in the group's second report, called Report of the 2nd Experts Group Meeting : Application Scenarios (.pdf, 285KB)