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The CONCERT Architecture

The CONCERT architecture offers a set of services for building distributed education sessions. It sits between the

• low-level network system and session components on the one side, and
• the developed education sessions on the other side.

The purpose of the architecture is twofold:

1. It represents a mental model providing the organizational framework for designing a distributed education session,
2. It provides an API (application programming interface) for the concrete session program implementing the distributed education session.

The core issue of the architecture is abstraction i.e. restricting the various facilities and technical details of the lower levels to a high-level standard interface targeted towards requirements of the application domain. The architecture presented in this section therefore does not provide a framework for building distributed applications in general but for a framework targeted to building distributed education sessions.

We will describe these two facets in the following subsections in turn.