Ownership management in distributed collaborative applications using HLA

The High Level Architecture (HLA) is an architecture that supports reuse and interoperability of components in a distributed simulation or virtual world. This paper describes die design of a distributed shared whiteboard using the HLA. Users across a distributed computer network are able to interact through the whiteboard using "scribble" objects. An important consideration in such an application is the ownership of objects. To ensure consistency, the distributed whiteboard is designed in such a way that only the owner of a scribble object is allowed to update or delete it. At the sane time, any changes made should be reflected in the remote scribble objects of the other users. To fully utilize the capability of the whiteboard as a medium of communication, transfer of ownership of the scribble objects among the users is required. This paper shows how the ownership transfer mechanisms may be implemented easily using the HLA.