Collaborative object-oriented visualization environment

Issue Title: Special Issue on Groupware and Multimedia; Guest Editors: José Pino and Jesus Favela In this paper, we present a Collaborative Object-oriented Visualization Environment (COVE) which provides a flexible and extensible framework for collaborative visualization. COVE integrates collaborative and parallel computing environments based on a distributed object model. It is built as a collection of concurrent objects: collaborative and application objects which interact with one another to construct collaborative parallel computing environments. The former enables COVE to execute various collaborative functions, while the latter allows it to execute fast parallel visualization in various modes. Also, flexibility and extensibility are provided by plugging the proper application objects into COVE at run-time, and making them interact with one another through collaboration objects. For our experiment, three visualization modes for volume rendering are designed and implemented to support the fast and flexible analysis of volume data in a collaborative environment.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]