Distributed Architecture for Supporting Collaboration

The research concerned by this paper is the design and implementation of a distributed digital system supporting participants during co-located collaborative sessions. In many companies, traditional methods are still used. The challenge is to propose a computer supported solution for helping the capitalization of knowledge without impacting the efficiency of such meetings. The paper presents the architecture of a distributed system involving different types of devices for main support a large multi-touch screen. The distributed architecture relies on a multi-agent system whose agents listen events from the applications and exchange messages for performing the functionalities of the system like synchronization and persistence. The technology used for the development of the applications and the agents is also detailed. The last section of the paper introduces experiments that have been achieved thanks to this system.