Cooperative information environments

The key aspects of the rapid evolution of information and the new potentials for communication between people in the last decade were the increased availability of computer networks and the trend towards teamwork. One of the main domains of Applied Informatics in the field of Distributed Systems is computer support for teamwork. Activities in that domain are known by the notions of groupware or computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). It is a multidisciplinary research field including computer science, economics, sociology, and psychology and it focuses on developing new theories and technologies for coordination of groups of people who work together. Key issues are group awareness, multi-user interfaces, concurrency control, communication and coordination within the group, shared information space and the support of a heterogeneous, open environment which integrates existing single-user applications. This paper presents an overview on next generation of collaborative environments. We introduce some basic ideas of ubiquitous computing. After this we give some examples how RFID techniques are helping to build those ubiquitous computing environments. We show how to build collaborative virtual environments and finally report on the design of toolbar support for collaborative web-based communities.