ICOM: A Framework for Integrated Collaborative Work Environments

Collaboration is an important activity that is increasingly using technology to improve the productivity of the participants. The Integrated Collaboration Object Model (ICOM) is a proposed OASIS standard for interoperation among collaboration services. ICOM is intended to be a framework for integrating a broad range of domain models for collaboration environments. The intention is to encourage independent software vendors and open source communities to create common collaboration clients that interoperate with integrated collaboration platforms and standalone collaboration services across enterprise boundaries. This paper provides an overview of ICOM that covers the high-level concepts, directory, space, access control, metadata, content management, and unified message models. ICOM is represented in several formats: the Java Persistence API, XML Schema, RDF and OWL. We also describe an example application based on ICOM.