A Collaboration Specification Language

COCA (Collaborative Objects Coordination Architecture) was proposed as a novel means to model and support collaborations over the Internet. Our approach separates coordination policies from user interfaces and the policies are specified in a logic-based language. Over the past year, both the collaboration model and the specification language have been substantially refined and evaluated through our experience in building real-life collaboration systems. This paper presents the design of the specification language and illustrates the main ideas with a few simple design examples. Semantics, implementation, runtime support, and applications are also covered but not as the focus of this paper.