The main issue in designing the system structure for CSCW is to provide efficient collaboration supports. We propose here a hierarchical collaboration support scheme which consists of three levels: system-oriented, application-oriented, and operation object-oriented collaboration support. To adapt to these hierarchical collaboration supports, we explore a platform-based architecture of CSCW system that can accommodate multiple cooperative applications. The common platform of this architecture presents the system-oriented and some application-oriented collaboration supports. Other collaboration supports are provided by cooperative applications. Therefore, the development of new cooperative applications can get rid of the unnecessary repetitional work and be speeded up. Based on this architecture, a multimedia desktop conferencing system: TH-MDCS is implemented under Ethernet and PC with MS-Windows environment.
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