Semantic structure in a federated collaboration environment

ConnectedSpaces is a novel federated collaboration environment that integrates different collaboration tools and paradigms for enterprise use. Collaborations are organized into containers called spaces. Recently we have extended ConnectedSpaces to enable spaces and their contents to have semantic properties. These properties can be queried, and queries can be embedded in a space or can be invoked by client applications. Different collaboration models are supported with different semantic structure. The design and implementation is described, and example illustrations are provided. Comparison is made with related approaches.