COOPERATIVE MULTIMEDIA EDITING TOOL FOR ENHANCED GROUP COMMUNICATION

We describe and sustain the decisions made during the conceptualizatio n of a cooperative multimedia editing tool, which enables co-authors t o cooperatively produce multimedia documents' The main goal is to enha nce inter-user communication. Co-authors can communicate their ideas, drafts, guidelines and constraints to other co-authors using a mixture of communication patterns, media and document organization. They keep exchanging information (remotely or face-to-face), improving passages and modifying notes until a final document is achieved. Our efforts w ere on integrating concepts from collaboration support, multimedia doc ument contents and multimedia communication rather than on making a sp ecialized system for any of them. In an integrated manner, the co-auth ors can edit text, raster images and 2D-object-oriented graphics infor mation. Moreover, one can communicate via a text, voice or video chann el (possibly more than one simultaneously).