Providing a distributed cooperative environment is a challenging task, which requires a middleware infrastructure that provides, among others, management of distributed shared data, synchronization, consistency, recovery, security and privacy support. In this paper, we present the ECADeG project which proposes a layered architecture for developing distributed cooperative environments running on top of a desktop grid middleware that can encompass multiple organizations. We also present a particular cooperative environment for supporting scientific research focused on the health domain. It uses the services supplied by the ECADeG architecture in order to allow researchers to share access to multiple institutions databases, visualize and analyze data by means of data mining techniques, edit research documents cooperatively, exchange information through forums and chats, etc.. Such a rich cooperative environment helps the establishment of partnerships between health care professionals and their institutions.
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