CERC Homepage
The IEEE Fourth International Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE `95) was held on April 20-22, 1995 at the Coolfont Resort in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. The workshop was sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and organized by the Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) at West Virginia University, with support from AAAI, and in cooperation with ACM SIGOIS. WETICE `95 attracted 38 participants from the U.S., Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, and the U.K. Many of these participants presented papers at WETICE `95 on technologies used for collaboration ranging from multimedia, the World-Wide Web, and CORBA. These proceedings contain these papers and the reports of three working groups that met at the workshop.
As in previous workshops, the participants came from a variety of backgrounds in engineering, medicine, computer science, and business management. Attendance was kept small but broad to facilitate effective group discussions. We feel that WETICE attendance is still strong because it offers an immediate forum for technology discussion not found in any other venue. We surveyed a small group of participants informally and found that many enjoy WETICE because they can discuss their interests and make contributions in the working groups.
Three working groups met in parallel to discuss complementary issues in collaboration technology research: Tools, Environments, and Process. The Tools group discussed the types of activities collaborators need from tools, what tools exist, what services are needed, and how tools will evolve in the next few years. The Environments group focused on standards issues, including how standards evolve and how developers can plan frameworks for the graceful evolution of their product in immature application domains. The Process group discussed the use of tools in collaborative environments to enable users to automate or partially automate their workflow in order to better understand it and to improve the process of collaborative work.
Perhaps this year was a turning point in research on collaboration technologies, thanks to the proliferation of the World-Wide Web (WWW). There was more consensus world-wide this year concerning the direction of collaboration technologies and their application in real work environments. New network technologies, such as the Multicasting Backbone (MBone) and the WWW, helped to emphasize the benefits of shared knowledge and helped to focus discussion on specific topics. It is my observation that this is the first year that clear technologies have emerged as leaders in distributed applications. Most of the WETICE `95 participants feel that more tools will become distributed and that they will need to address collaboration issues.
The papers cover a broad spectrum of topics, but all have the underlying theme of using technology to enable collaboration, in many fields. I believe the papers and working group reports are novel in content, addressing state-of-the-art issues that currently form the frontier for this exciting area of research.
Workshop Agenda
| How to Order the Workshop Proceedings | Chair and Program Committeehttp://www.cerc.wvu.edu/WETICE/WETICE95/WETICE95_report.html