In the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) domain, researchers have always wondered about which concepts and architectures to adopt for the development of collaborative applications (or groupware), capable to suitably meet user requirements. Besides the multidisciplinarity inherent to this domain, considering that collaborative activities engage several people presenting different (often unpredictable) needs, evolutivity and flexibility appear as two mandatory requirements for collaborative applications. However, integrated collaborative environments are rarely open, extensible and reconfigurable enough so as to meet these requirements. As a result, users decide to create their own collaborative environments by using different collaborative applications, working side by side but independently, without really getting advantage of each other. Allowing the integration of these applications could bring significant benefits to users. An integrated collaboration environment would allow different functionalities of existing applications to be dynamically combined and controlled (enhancing therefore flexibility). This thesis main goal is to design a new environment allowing the integration of existing groupware, without dealing with their low-level features. This environment, called LEICA (Loosely-coupled Environment for Integrating Collaborative Applications) defines a loosely-coupled integration approach which is based on Web services technology, an event notification system, and the definition of collaboration policies to control the interactions among integrated applications. We start from an informal description of the general integration approach, where integrated applications are initially contacted through their Web services interfaces, interacting thereafter by exchanging event notifications in the context of an integrated collaborative session. Their interactions are controlled by the collaboration policy defined for this collaborative session. The coll aboration policy defines how the collaboration activity supported by one application will be affected by information received from other applications. After that, we describe in this thesis the architecture of LEICA enabling the implementation of such an integration approach. Based on this informal architectural description, we propose a method for formalizing it by using the UML/SDL profile and the simulation functionalities supported by the Telelogic software tool Tau G2. Finally, we have also implemented the first prototype of LEICA where two collaborative applications are currently integrated. null null
