A Collaborative Visualization Framework Using Jini Technology

It is difficult to achieve mutual understanding of complex information between individuals that are separated geographically. Two well-known techniques commonly used to deal with this difficultly are collaboration and information visualization. This thesis develops a generic flexible framework that supports both collaboration and information visualization. It introduces the Collaborative Visualization Environment (COVE) framework, which simplifies the development of real-time synchronous multi-user applications by decoupling the elements of collaboration from the application. This allows developers to focus on building applications and leave the difficulties of collaboration (i.e. concurrency controls, user awareness, session management, etc.) to the framework. The framework uses an object sharing approach to share information and views between participants in a collaborative session. This approach takes advantage of several Java technologies (i.e., JavaBeans", Jini", and JavaSpaces"). JavaBeans" establish a well-known standard for applications to operate within the framework. Jini" services provide framework stability and enable code sharing across the network. Objects are shared between remote clients through the JavaSpaces" service.