Collaboration Services to Support Interactions in Disaster Relief Scenarios

Many groupware applications developed on top of platforms supporting collaborative work are limited in their portability and interoperability because they are platform locked. In heterogeneous scenarios, such as disaster relief efforts or police operations, the interoperability of the several systems becomes a critical issue to coordinate the efforts of every operative unit. This paper presents a middleware called DCSL collaboration services layer - that provides a set of standard groupware services for both client and server applications allowing interoperability among heterogeneous groupware systems. The services encapsulate and hide incompatibilities among groupware platforms and thus, they allow developers to build interoperable groupware applications with a minor effort