The GRACE project: towards large scale group communication systems

The group activity communication environment (GRACE) project is concerned with the development of an OSI based Group Communication Service that can support a wide range of collaborative activities. The project is of two years duration and is funded by the Joint Network Team. The approach adopted has been to examine a number of existing activities in which collaboration through information sharing is important in order to derive a set of generic group communication services. Initially, GRACE has focused on activities in which the information sharing is not highly procedural or constrained. The project has identified four items necessary for the design of a Group Communication Service: example activities, a conceptual model of information sharing, a distributed architecture, and specific service models. The paper describes only features of the conceptual model and the prototype architecture