SPECIFICATION OF COMMUNICATION SERVICES FOR MULTIMEDIA COOPERATIVE APPLICATIONS BASED ON THE REFERENCE MODEL OF ODP

Between a wide range of distributed applications, this work is particu larly focused on those applications which allow a group of persons, wh o are geographically distributed, to interact and cooperate exchanging different kind of information in order to realize group activities in a common work environment. In this paper, we realized a study of this kind of applications to identify general and functional characteristi cs which will then enable us to determine their communication requirem ents. Also, we analyzed the existent support architectures to examine whether they support multimedia cooperative applications. Based on the results of analysis, we proposed a set of communication functions nee ded additionally to support these applications, using the ODP(Open Dis tributed Processing) modelling concepts, rules and viewpoints as our g lobal design methodology.