Integrating collaborative applications with LEICA

Due to their unpredictable nature, collaboration activities are rarely supported by a single CSCW technology. Then different types of collaborative applications are usually applied in order to support group work such as collaborative e-learning. But in spite of being executed to accomplish a common collaboration task, these applications are executed independently without getting any advantage of each other. The integration of such applications would allow them to dynamically combine their different functionalities in a controlled way. In order to achieve integration, we propose LEICA, a loosely-coupled integration environment which allows collaborative applications to interact without loosing their autonomy. LEICA relies on the definition of collaboration policies for controlling the interactions between collaborative applications.