Developing a mobile collaborative toolkit for industrial applications

A mobile collaborative toolkit (MoCT) is presented in this paper to improve the performance of the collaboration in the mobile manufacturing environment. In order to enable the MoCT, a three-layered architecture including data management layer, user interface layer and server layer is constructed. Then the corresponding techniques, scalable vector graphics (SVG) and whiteboard for enabling the architecture are introduced. SVG is used for parsing and rendering the light-weighted drawings. Depending on a new XML-based awareness structure, a whiteboard is constructed; so as to it can be collaboratively operated conveniently. Finally, a MoCT prototype system is developed to show that the MoCT is efficient in the mobile manufacturing environment.