The NIST Manufacturing Collaboratory Project hosted a seminar and workshop on Mitre's Joint Collaboration Services (JCS) collaboration toolkit and architecture 2/18. JCS is a DARPA-funded Java/CORBA framework supporting rapid construction of tailored collaborative user environments. JCS provides developers with distributed services supporting key collaboration components, including: Context, a metaphor- and representation-neutral abstraction for virtual places used to factor the total collaborative activity in a system; Conference, an abstraction subsuming conversations of all sorts, including audiovisual conference tools, text chat, shared applications, etc.; and Participant, a representation of human participants and personified software agents as first class objects. JCS implements mechanism in servers and policy in clients, leading to the ability to use JCS to construct a variety of collaborative user environments with diverse user experience policies, tailored to the requirements and metaphors of the particular system being constructed. JCS is being deployed at NIST for evaluation and potential use.

For further information, contact Micky Steves, (301)975-3537.