Building a structured collaboration system from XML specification

In today´s distributed organizations, there is a huge need of establishing a collaborative environment where multiple users can cooperate to achieve common goals. This paper proposes a lightweight approach for automatic and transparent collaboration workflow environment, supporting generic collaboration scenario. The interesting aspect of our work is the fact that collaboration designer needs just to specify the workflow description according to a simple and structured model. The collaboration is built from a high-level specification form in XML schema, making it very easy for non-professionals to establish collaboration. As a proof of concept, we apply our approach to medical collaborative diagnosis.