Design of a Layered Component-Based System for Sharing Visualization Objects in Collaborative Environments

This paper presents a layered component-based system approach aiming at providing facilities for cooperating in Collaborative Visualization Environments by sharing the state of the visualization between users. The requirements addressed by the system concern scalability, decoupling, abstraction, and application-independence. The proposed component-based system is structured into two different layers: (i) Collaborative Middleware Layer, responsible for notifying users when events occur, and (ii) Collaborative User Layer, in charge of intercepting and executing user requests. The paper presents also a collaborative task flow diagram, which shows the sequence of procedures that must be completed to create and share visualization objects. The applicability of the system is illustrated by a healthcare case study, in which two users interact with each other as well as with visualization objects in a shared collaborative environment. The visualization objects are generated by applying two different reconstruction techniques to medical images coming from various modalities like Computed Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Ray Casting and Multiplanar Reconstruction.