Cobricks - Background

Contextual Collaboration

Software for supporting collaboration in teams or communities have been monolitic systems with proprietary user interfaces. Because of this integration of collaboration and community support systems with each other and with other infrastructure components like portals, identity management systems or content management solutions are not possible or very hard to do.

First attempts to address these issues can be found in the collaboration product lines of different vendors like IBM or Oracle. Further work is on defining and implementing (Web Service) interfaces for collaboration modules is done in the context of "Contextual Collaboration".

Cobricks

In the project Cobricks we are working on concepts for the modularization and integration of collaboration and community support applications. This includes architectural landscapes, interfaces and standards for data structures (ontologies).

Based on the ideas about modular support of collaboration and communities we have developped a modular community platform toolkit that supports building and operating interoperable community platforms.

Cobricks-1 - the early days ...

We started building Cobricks in the Collaborative Systems group at Technische Universitaet Muenchen in 1998.

The first version of the Cobricks toolkit (Cobricks-1) was used to build several research prototypes, but also supports some public live platforms:

• Fakultät für Informatik, TU München
• Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, TU München
• Institut für Informationstechnische Systeme, Universität der Bundeswehr München
• GI Fachgruppe Computer-Supported Cooperative Work

Cobricks-2 - now it works ...

With the experience gained from the first version of the toolkit we started to implement a completely redesigned version of Cobricks mid 2003, Cobricks-2. This software is available as open source project now and is still supported broadly by Technische Universitaet Muenchen.