MANICORAL

The Manicoral project was designed as a 4 year project (2 phases of 2 years each). The first phase is the one reported on. The project is concerned with exploring, developing and evaluating a Computer Supported Cooperative Work system (LCSCW) among a geographically distributed European Research community. The user group, AFRICAR (Altimetry for Research in Climate And Resources) is a group of geoscientists investigating the use and exploitation of radar Altimetry data. MANICORAL aims at enhancing their cooperation through development of CSCW tools, and enhance access to scientific data through development of database services. A group of experts from human-computer interaction is responsible for developing the conceptual and methodological framework and the requirements capture for the co-operative system, and for the (humanistic and social) evaluation of the constitutive influence of the technologies on the research community. A third group, the technology providers has to provide a system for Distributed Cooperative Visualisations (DCV). The approach underlying the requirements capture and specification, the development of frameworks, the development of services and of new DCW tools is that of iterative prototyping based in a Scandinavian tradition.