Collaborative computing: networking, applications and worksharing

CollaborateCom is an annual international forum for dissemination of original ideas and research results in collaborative computing networks, systems, and applications. A major goal and feature of CollaborateCom is to bring researchers from networking, systems, CSCW, collaborative learning, and collaborative education areas - gether. CollaborateCom 2008 held in Orlando, Florida, was the fourth conference of the series and it reflects the accelerated growth of collaborative computing, both as research and application areas. Concretely, recent advances in many computing fields have contributed to the growing interconnection of our world, including multi-core architectures, 3G/4G wi- less networks, Web 2. 0 technologies, computing clouds, and software as a service, just to mention a few. The potential for collaboration among various components has - ceeded the current capabilities of traditional approaches to system integration and interoperability. As the world heads towards unlimited connectivity and global c- puting, collaboration becomes one of the fundamental challenges for areas as diverse as eCommerce, eGovernment, eScience, and the storage, management, and access of information through all the space and time dimensions. We view collaborative c- puting as the glue that brings the components together and also the lubricant that makes them work together. The conference and its community of researchers dem- strate the concrete progress we are making towards this vision. The conference would not have been successful without help from so many people.