OpenCoweb - Project Mission

Project Mission

Objective

The purpose of this community endeavor is to nurture and evolve an open web developers framework for the creation of cooperative web applications. The Cooperative Web Framework is positioned as a productivity aid for web application developers who desire to enable an emerging class of cooperative web applications, specifically but not limited to, the Distance Learning and Healthcare industries.

While similar proprietary solutions for web collaboration are already surfacing, web application developers lack today a simple way to enable real-time cooperation of users over applications and data in a web browser container. The Cooperative Web Framework is built on web standards that are being adopted by client browsers thereby broadening the scope of applicability across browser platforms and device footprints.

Scope

The innovative value add for cooperative web applications is that web applications can now be used in an N:N model (each attendee can simultaneously interact with all the other attendees) as  opposed to the traditional 1:N web meeting model. The Cooperative Web Framework handles remote notification of user changes, the resolution of conflicting changes, and convergence of application state with minimal information from the application. The combination of mobility trends, proprietary solutions coupled with demonstrated public and private sector interest in Telepresence Lite solutions suggests that a base enablement framework for an open solution is now timely.

Contributors participating in this project will focus on support for cooperative web capabilities across any browser/platform, regardless of device footprint.