ARTICIEL: A supporting platform for collaborative
work - Application to the creation of 3D-persons
Sabri Boutemedjet, Faysal Abouzaid, Omar Cherkaoui, Gilles Gauthier
Université du Québec à Montréal
Laboratoire de Téléinformatique
PO BOX 8888, Downtown Branch
Montreal (Quebec) H3C 3P8 – CANADA
Abstract. Is it possible to organize artists’ work? This paper presents the
original architecture of a collaborative platform that provides a framework for
artists to optimize their productivity. Moreover, communities can use this
environment in a profitable way and for several purposes such as creation of
3D-persons, e-learning, and software development. We present an approach for
building such an open platform
We present a study case of ARTICIEL where we present a platform dedicated
to artistic creation of 3D-persons. It is built upon a Web service infrastructure,
based on industry standard portal technologies such as XML, WSDL,
BPEL4WS and RDF. It allows a great flexibility to the platform builders to
create new services without modifying existing modules. Specific modules for
the creation of 3D-persons have been developed and a Maya plug-in was also
integrated to manage this process.
1 Introduction
The initial objective of the ARTICIEL project was to develop a collaborative platform for
artists creating 3D-persons in order to organize and optimize their production. The challenge
was to create an open environment not only for artistic creation but also for several other
applications such as e-learning or software development.
We conceptualized an environment that provides a set of common functions for multiple
CSCW systems and allows the platform managers to add specific modules onto this framework.
The platform is based on standards for meta-data, annotations and web services in such a
way that it can export data to any platform compliant to these standards, or import data from
such platforms.
The architecture of the platform is designed as a two layers system. The first layer is the
supporting platform that provides the common services. The second layer refers to the
applications dedicated to a specific domain such as the creation of 3D-persons or e-learning.
This architecture has the purpose to provide a framework for building a collaborative
platform that will run independently of the operating system and make it easier to add new
functionalities.
We applied these concepts to the field of creation of 3D-persons. The main justification for
this is that actually graphic applications used in this domain are mono-user. This causes a lot of
waste of time because an artist who wants to work on the same object than his colleague must
wait until he finishes. Moreover it is often necessary to do manually the same time costly
Boutemedjet S., Abouzaid F., Cherkaoui O. and Gauthier G. (2004).
ARTICIEL: A supporting platform for collaborative work - Application to the creation of 3D-persons.
In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computer Supported Activity Coordination, pages 239-245
DOI: 10.5220/0002673902390245
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

modifications to different objects. Artists we worked with were looking for a way to automate
some of these tedious works.
Objectives of the ARTICIEL platform dedicated to the creation of 3D-persons are:
• To optimize artists' productivity by allowing them to work simultaneously on an object or
to reapply repetitive commands to different objects.
• To efficiently integrate the artistic work.
• To make artists accept such a way of work by means of transparency, ease of use and a
user-friendly interface.
This paper describes how our ARTICIEL platform addresses the challenges or problems
referred to previously by intense usage of standards for the definition of its main concepts and
service oriented architecture.
The paper is divided into five sections as follows. After introducing the subject in section
one, we present in section two general features and requirements of CSCW
system. Section
three is an overview of main features of the platform. Architecture and implementation are
described in section four. We conclude our paper with some open issues and future work.
2 Topics on Collaborative environments
Many CSCW systems have been developed and more and more CSCW systems will appear in
the future. Although they are designed for different purposes, almost all of them have some
similarities in many aspects.
In such environments problems are numerous for developers:
- Platforms must provide users with a way to be aware of what is happening in the
environment (awareness) [13],
- Manage objects in different workspaces in such a manner to avoid inconsistency,
- Generally, in most common platforms, it is difficult to modify or to create some new
functionality. The challenge is how a platform can be adaptable to many contexts of
usage.
Mutual awareness holds that the articulation of activities in cooperative work often requires
the creation and continual update of mutual awareness of the activities, concerns and intentions
of the other members involved in the cooperative work [3]. Mutual awareness among users
allows distributed activities to be coordinated between users. Tools such as a shared space or
chat room may help in this way [13].
Because several users may create multiple copies of the same object and modify these
copies, the system must provide means to maintain the consistency of shared objects.
Other specifications of functional and technical requirements for CSCW are listed in [11]
and can be used as a guideline for evaluating collaborative platforms. Principle criteria are:
− Application Criteria and Requirements: it refers to common applications such as
messaging or calendar or specific applications.
− Functional Criteria and Requirements:
• Interaction and Coordination within a group of users
• Distribution which refers to the way users connect to the platform
• Data Hiding which refers to the way private and public data are separated
− Technical Criteria and Requirements
• CSCW Architecture that depicts he way items are implemented
Flexibility is similar to tailorability [14]: it is the ways in which applications could be
customised to accommodate individual differences between members of a community. It is an
overall criterion and is critical in the development of groupware systems [3].
Usually there are three levels of tailorability:
- Customization where one can select options from a set of predefined options
- Integration where one can compose modules from a set of predefined components
- Extension which means that one can add new functionalities to the system
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3 ARTICIEL Overview
In order to provide extensibility and interoperability with other collaborative environments, the
platform implements the following standards:
- IMS [8] for the metadatas. That means that ARTICIEL is able to export its entire data to
other platforms compliant with this standard, and in the same way to import data.
- ‘Annotea’ [2] for annotations. That is to ease retrieval of objects we use an annotation
engine compliant with this specification. Annotations are stored in an RDF format.
- RDFS [9] for the definition of all the concepts of the platform. That allows their easy reuse
in order to generate a specific platform.
Also, the entire ARTICIEL platform was built upon a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
[15] to meet architectural and functional specifications. The whole system is designed as a set
of services reachable through the Web and each service provides access to a set of
functionalities. The platform is based upon Web Services with all the technologies related to
this paradigm (XML, WSDL [4], UDDI, SOAP and BPEL4WS [7])
3.1 technical and functional criteria
ARTICIEL provides common tools such as calendar, mail and chat rooms. It adds dedicated
services such as a plug-in for graphic software, a merger for contributions [1] and an annotation
engine.
ARTICIEL uses an asynchronous mode, to allow collaborative work between users. Artists
work separately on objects and check them out in a shared folder in order to integrate them.
Users interact within groups that can be defined in relationship to each community’s
specificity.
ARTICIEL is web-based and thus reachable from any geographical location.
Finally, ARTICIEL is based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web services.
Services can be distributed over multiple servers in a transparent manner for users. Personal
data is stored in local folders while common data is situated in a shared workspace.
For the specific purpose of artists’ creation, we introduced the concept of ‘contributions’
[1]. A contribution is a XML file referencing objects and their annotations in the ARTICIEL
platform. This way of packaging works allows their reusability in the same environment where
they were created or in a different one. It also allows them to be merged in order to create
automatically new contributions. This concept is the central node of collaboration between
artists.
4 Architecture of the ARTICIEL Platform
To build a collaborative platform for a specific need, one can proceed in two manners: building
it from scratch or extend an existing platform. The first approach is time costly and could lead
to unwanted results. In the second case we need a ‘supporting platform’ that could make it
possible to provide ‘tailorability’ [16].
The service oriented architecture of ARTICIEL makes it able to provide at the same time
customization, integration (one can compose existing services to create new ones) and
extension (one can add new services without modifying existing ones).
4.1 Service Oriented Architecture.
In this architecture, a system is composed of a collection of interacting services. Exposing
functionality as services is the key to flexibility. A system evolves through the addition of new
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services. The resulting service-oriented architecture defines the services provided by the system
and describes the interactions that occur among the services to realize certain behavior [15].
One of the primary benefits of (SOA) is the ability to compose services from other less
complex services. This activity, called service composition or
orchestration, allows
developers to compose applications and processes using services from heterogeneous
environments without regard to the details and differences of those environments. We use the
composition language BPL4WS [7] to define composition between ARTICIEL services.
ARTICIEL platform is based on this type of architecture because this concept is very
attractive for an environment whose main objective is tailorability and extensibility.
4.2 The ARTICIEL supporting platform and common services
The ARTICIEL supporting platform provides the infrastructure for collaborating and managing
Data, Sessions, Users, Consistency, Annotations, Collaboration primitives, Users Interfaces.
Several communities can use the platform by selecting the adequate services or/and defining
their specific concepts. RDF Schemas [9] are used to extend the community’s vocabulary and
the platform functionalities.
The ARTICIEL platform is composed of the following functional entities providing services
to external users. These services are the common or the basic services. By composing them, one
can generate a new platform providing basic services. These entities are:
- User Manager,
- User communities Manager,
- Groups Manager,
- Annotations system,
- Session Manager,
- Data Manager,
- Collaborating system,
- Event Manager,
- Workflow Management System
Most of these services are common to all platforms and will not be detailed here.
Annotations system. Annotations are comments, explanations, or actions attached to any
structured document or to a part of it. They are defined in external documents. When using a
document, a user can view his annotations from one or more annotation server [2]. The
annotation system provides functionalities for managing annotations (retrieval, deletion, etc.).
In the ARTICIEL platform, annotations are created via a plug-in attached to graphic software.
The collaboration system provides means to communicate between users.
The Event Manager is the central component of the platform and is essential for any
distributed system with several services. Main advantages are coordination between services
and consistency. This service is based on the ‘publish-subscribe’ paradigm [12, 4].
Workflow management. The workflow management service is responsible for the
management of the tasks created by the platform manager. This service allows the interaction
between services. It allows:
- The description of basic functions that allows creation of processes and their data,
compliant with the XPDL (XML Process Definition Language) specification [10]
- The launching of processes defined by their XPDL documents and the definition of
participants to each activity
The Data Manager provides functionalities for the management of shared repertories.
Persistent data relating to system operation are stored as relational data in a database.
All the previous services are described and detailed in RDF schemas. The purpose here is to
allow a platform builder to use these schemas in order to choose which services to implement
the following the initial requirements, build a BPL4WS file to compose services and generate
the required service. This is done to meet the needs of a specific community.
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4.3 The application for 3D-persons creation: High layer processes
One specific need for artists creating 3D-objects is to share works of the same object between
several artists and to compose their contributions after they have finished. Another one is the
ability to reapply some repetitive operations on the same object or on different ones.
To provide these features we developed a specific application for the creation of 3D-persons
that includes the following:
- A Contributions manager (which provides operations such as search, delete, insert, filter
and merge contributions including annotations)
- A plug-in integrating 3D software that artists can use in their work. This plug-in
constitutes an interface between the 3D software and all the rest of ARTICIEL. It realizes
the capture and the reuses each artist contribution and adds semantic to objects.
Contributions are stored in a shared space and can be reused or merged with others
contributions from the same artist or a different one in order to produce new contributions. For
more details see [1].
4.4 Architecture
The service oriented architecture of the platform is shown in figure 1. As mentioned, the
platform is separated (virtually) into two main sets of components:
- Common services
- High level services for the creation of 3D-persons.
Fig. 1. : ARTICIEL Architecture
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Users interact with the platform via an interface automatically generated by the interface
generator and that presents the services provided by the service composition module.
4.5 Implementation of the ARTICIEL Platform
The platform is at an advanced stage of development. Due to the specificity of the domain it
was initially targeting - most artists use tools from Microsoft environment - it was developed
under Microsoft .NET and most of its services are developed in the C# language. Use of SOA
architecture allows the adding of any new service in any other language or environment in a
transparent way to final users.
Using ARTICIEL, artists can now work in parallel on the same object and compose their
contributions.
They can also reapply in an intelligent manner any work on an object to
other objects while saving a great deal of time.
5 Conclusion
This paper has presented the ARTICIEL architecture and its application to the creation of
3D-persons framework. The platform was developed as a two-layered architecture. The
supporting platform allows users to define specific environment dedicated to their domain of
interest.
The ARTICIEL framework consists of a set of separate modules that may be used together
to provide support for cooperative artistic creation of 3D-persons across the web.
The platform is implemented as a true service oriented architecture and is built around Web
standards using XML and RDF as a data storage and interchange format.
We adopted a SOA approach whose advantages are multiple. First, the components can be
widely used to implement any cooperative applications and systems. All services of the
platform can be invoked and integrated by means of a process execution language like
BPEL4WS. This means that a subset of services can be selected out to implement a new
cooperative application. Thus, any user can build a specific platform compliant to his needs.
Secondly, Web Services are used to implement all the components, so the platform is
completely independent from any environment and can be expanded as one wants. Thirdly, any
developer who wants to extend the functionalities of ARTICIEL can develop his own service
without modifying any of the existing ones and publish it. Finally, ARTICIEL is compliant
with many standards such as Annotea and IMS. This permits to export its features to any
platform using the same standards or to import concepts from other systems.
There are a number of areas for future work. The focus is actually made upon security
features. Our next work is to integrate to the system an ontology that describes the relevant
concepts in order to ease communication between communities of users. The ontology can also
be operationalized for use in tools for the retrieval of all existing objects.
Another important feature to explore is the support of synchronous work between artists.
Additional promising areas we begun to explore is to formally specify the behavior of main
component of the platform, in order to verify some properties using techniques from model-
checking.
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