Community-Workshop: platform technology

Workshop for experts on 25 February 2000, MARS-Exploratory Media Lab, FhG Institute for Media Communication, Sankt Augustin, Schloss Birlinghoven

Goal

The goal of the workshop was to define the requirements and technical guidelines for the development of the CAT Internet platform as a database-supported community system. As a starting-point, the first prototype of the CAT platform was to be discussed and the suitability for further development of the enCore Xpress System it was based on was to be evaluated. The workshop was to produce two alternative technical concepts for the development of the CAT Internet platform. The experts invited were also asked to formulate proposals for possible cooperation.

Results

The result of the workshop was the concept of an open source distributed community system based on the CORBA model for the CAT Internet platform. The technical method and the main requirements for individual modules were specified. The first functional implementation will be a 3-layer model with a central application server.
Because of the successful work of the CSCW research group under Professor Freisleben at the University of Siegen and the overlap between research work being undertaken there and the development of the CAT distributed community system, we decided in favour of collaboration with the Siegen research group. This means that we have found a competent research partner for the development of the CAT Internet platform. At the same time, this cooperation offers the opportunity to involve students from research in the development. In addition, individual workshop participants can be included as active partners in a later phase of the development.

Workshop Participants

Invited Participants

Dr. Sigrid Helle
University of Halle (databases)
Dipl. Ing. Reni Banov
Kom-Pro GmbH, Zagreb (databases)
Thomax Kaulmann
hacker/data artist, Berlin (community systems)
Walter van der Cruijsen
hacker/data artist, Berlin (community systems)
Prof. Dr. Bernd Freisleben*
University of Siegen (CSCW, distributed systems)
Dr. Manfred Bogen**
FhG, Sankt Augustin, Schloss Birlinghoven (databases)
* A later date was also arranged with Professor Freisleben, because he was not able to attend the workshop on the specified date.
** Dipl. Ing. Andreas Karajannis, FhG, took the place of Dr. Manfred Bogen.

Members of the CAT team

[link 01] Monika Fleischmann
Head of the MARS-Exploratory Media Lab
[link 02] Wolfgang Strauss
Media Artist and Architect
Jasminko Novak
Computer Scientist
Elisabeth Kaliva
Student of Computer Science
Predrag Peranovic
Computer Scientist

The details about the institutions and functions of the participants are valid as of February 2000