Keynote Talk: Collaboration@work. At the crossroad of old technology and new IT trends.

Collaboration @ work was first defined in the Collaboration @ work report 2004 as "collaboration among individuals engaged in a common task to achieve a shared objective using collaboration technologies". At that time the focus was on collaboration services providing functionalities at middleware level which could be reusable at the application level. Reflecting this focus, the Research European Union 6th Framework Programme Strategic Objective 2.5.9 "Collaborative working environments" was drafted up to achieve a common repository of collaboration services to be invoked by collaboration tools and integrated into large validating applicators. A budget of 40 Mio € is devoted to this Strategic Objective (SO) in 2005. Work to be carried out within this SO will contribute to the use of collaborative technologies with a mediating role among distributed workers and as a glue of diverse technologies (such as mixed-reality, visualisation, interfaces technologies) to support collaboration among people and other artefacts (robots, actuators, sensors).