View article

This paper presents a confederation of tools, called Coral, that combine to support the real-time capture of and subsequent access to informal collaborative activities. The tools provide the means to initiate digital multimedia recordings, a variety of methods to index those recordings, and ways to retrieve the indexed material in other settings. The current system emerged from a convergence of the WhereWereWe multimedia work, the Tivoli LiveBoard application, and the Inter-Language Unification distributed-object programming infrastructure. We are working with a specific user community and application domain, which has helped us shape a particular, demonstrably useful, configuration of tools and to get extensive real-world experience with them. This domain involves frequent discussion and decision-making meetings and later access of the captured records of those meetings to produce accurate documentation …