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 particularly focused on those applications which allow a group of persons, who 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 characteristics which will then enable us to determine their communication requirements. 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 needed additionally to support these applications, using the ODP(Open Distributed Processing) modelling concepts, rules and view points as our global design methodology.