SHASTRA - An Architecture for Development of Collaborative Applications

We address the issue of design of architectures and abstractions to implement multimedia scientific manipulation systems in a Concurrent Engineering setting, where experts in a cooperating group communicate and interact to solve problems. We propose a model for the integration of software tools into a multiuser distributed and collaborative environment on the multimedia desktop, and describe a prototype CSCW infrastructure which we have used to implement scientific problem solving tools. Finally, we briefly describe a prototype CE system built on this infrastructure. SHASTRA presents a unified prototype for some crucial enabling technologies for Concurrent Engineering -- Multimedia Communication, Framework Integration, Coordination, and Enterprise Integration. 1 Overview This section introduces SHASTRA in the context of related work. Section 2 describes the architecture and highlights the main features of the system. Section 3 introduces SHASTRA Multimedia Services and Section 4 brief..