LEICA: Loosely-coupled environment for integrating collaborative applications

Group activities generally involve several people presenting different collaborative tasks and requirements. Accordingly, collaboration is rarely supported by a single CSCW technology. Different types of collaborative applications are then applied in order to support group work. But in spite of being used with a common purpose, applications are executed independently. The integration of such applications would allow them to dynamically interoperate, combining their different functionalities in a controlled way. To achieve integration, we propose LEICA*, a loosely-coupled integration environment which allows collaborative applications to interact without loosing their autonomy.