Title: Supporting virtual meetings in the overall business context

Authors: Weigang Wang, Jorg M. Haake, Jessica Rubart

Addresses: Computation Department, UMIST, Manchester M60 1QD, UK. ' FernUniversitaet in Hagen, Computer Science VI, Informatikzentrum, Universitaetsstr. 1, D-58084 Hagen, Germany. ' Fraunhofer Institute - Integrated Publication and Information Systems (IPSI), Dolivostr. 15, 64293 Darmstadt, Germany

Abstract: Current distributed meeting support systems support meeting management, audio/video communication and application sharing. The modelling and the execution of meeting processes are usually not supported. Moreover, the overall business context of the meetings in an enterprise is missing. In this paper, a cooperative hypermedia system is presented, which provides jointly editable visual hypermedia artifacts in a distributed meeting. These visual hypermedia objects can be used for modelling meeting processes, handling external documents and application integration. In addition, the system provides process support for flexible meeting control and the invocation of communication tools, office tools, and groupware tools for specific meeting activities. More importantly, the meeting processes and their related information objects are modeled as part of the overall enterprise model such that they are placed in the overall business context of an enterprise. Use cases are provided to show how a distributed project team can perform many kinds of distributed meetings, while enjoying dedicated support for the planning, control, information management, and follow-up activities as integral parts of their business tasks.

Keywords: cooperative hypermedia; distributed meeting support; process support; visual hypermedia; virtual meetings.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2004.004366

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2004 Vol.19 No.3/4, pp.195 - 208

Published online: 10 May 2004 *

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