Collaboration Services Specification
Jay Carlson, Lucy Deus, Rod Holland, John Kordash, Jeff Kurtz, John Ramsdell, Mark Maybury …
The MITRE Corporation
202 Burlington Road
Bedford, MA 01730
{nop, ,lucy, rholland, kordash, jkurtz, ramsdell, maybury …}@mitre.org
ABSTRACT
There is an increasing proliferation of computer supported collaborative workplace products. These products appear in diverse areas such as conferencing, shared applications, and workflow management. This paper describes an ontology of collaboration that addresses both synchronous (e.g., video and audio conferencing) and asynchronous (e.g. email, chat) interactions. The aim is to provide a baseline of definitions and example IDL which will serve as a foundation for discussion and further community refinement within the OMG.
Keywords
Collaboration, services, conference, context, participants.
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of collaboration, from the Latin to work together, is the “process of coordinating and communicating a shared state.” Three important abstractions are central to all collaborations: conference, context, and participants. We define these in turn, exemplifying these with IDL from application prototypes.
Conference
A conference is a shared, multiparty, uni and/or multimodal session with a single point of control. We intend this in the broadest sense to include both human-human and human-agent interactions, over various modalities including shared application mediated interactions. Conferences include, for example, audio and video conferencing interactions as well as whiteboard and text chat. Another example is multiple users working on a word processing document where others are notified of changes. T.120, especially its data conferencing and session management elements, is an important standard for the realization of conferences.
Context
A context is a persistent, metaphor neutral collection of participants, conversations and things (i.e., information, tools). It is independent of any particular participant’s view of the collaboration system. Examples of conventional contexts include rooms (with associated participants, materials, tools), plans, geospatial/temporal extents, processes, and projects.
Participant
A participant is a representation of a user or agent. Examples might include individuals (e.g., John), their software delegates (e.g., John’s agent) and organisations (e.g., US Airways). Each participant represents exactly one entity (e.g. person) and is not dependent on number or types of connections to collaboration services.
RELATIONSHIPS AND INTERACTIONS
Contexts have a list of associated conferences along with metadata about each conference’s relationship to the context (e.g., audio and video conferences that are associated, or sets of conferences that clients should join by default).
Contexts and conferences have rosters of participants currently joined and participating. A single participant may join any number of conferences and contexts; after the service-determined authorization, other participants are notified of the new participant’s arrival.
Role
This refers to the attributes that model the capabilities, behaviours, and responsibilities and can act as a unit of adjudication. Examples might include organisational roles such as that indicated by title for individuals or organizational elements (e.g., CEO or CFO), level of responsibility (e.g., Major, Colonel), or classes of individuals (e.g., emergency room doctor). A particular role need not affect any software authorization decisions to be useful, as possession itself may serve as a communication to other participants about the holder of the role.
Each participant in a context or conference plays zero or more roles as part of that participation.
User interface
A spectrum of tailored clients may be created using the above services. These may have varying types of user interaction policies which will be the participants experience of the collaboration environment, tailored to domain or customer needs. .
ENABLING SERVICES
These higher-level collaboration services within collaboration environments are not possible without rich infrastructure support. Some important services which are necessary for collaboration environments include:
Naming and Directory
The ability to name, store and discover users, information, and services in standard repositories (e.g., using the Light Weight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)) is central to enabling collaboration environments.
Document Management
Frequently a document acts as the shared state and/or an artifact around and/or through which collaborative events occur. Important facilities include the ability to create, access, modify, and share documents.
Workflow
This includes the definition, coordination, and communication of work processes. Important dependencies include modelling processes that are constrained by and/or dependent upon participants, their roles, and/or context.
Publish/Subscribe
This enables users to provide and/or request on a persistent basis information or notification of changes. For example, a participant many subscribe to particular types of event changes.
Schedule/Calendar Management
There are many schedule interdependencies within collaboration environments ranging from scheduling of synchronous conferencing to managing workflow actions.
Security Services
Security and privacy is essential to the organisational acceptance of many collaboration environments. Services include authentication, auditing, and encryption.
INTERRELATION OF SERVICES
Collaboration shares object model requirements with its supporting services. For example, security services should refer to the same participants and roles as are used in contexts; workflow has a need for commonality there as well.
SUMMARY
There are many activities that remain to be completed including:
- refinement of services
- interrelation and constraints of services
- research into emerging areas such as asymmetric collaboration and split awareness, which may drive new clients and/or services.
REFERENCES
- Spellman, P. J., Mosier, J. N., Deus, L. M., Carlson, J. A., 1997. Collaborative Virtual Workspace. Proceedings of International ACM SIGGROUP Conference of Supporting Group Work, 16-19 November, Phoenix, Arizona,197-203. ACM Press: NY.
- JCS Reference?
DO WE WANT TO EXEMPLIFY A COLLABORATION USER SPACE, as in:
As shown in Figure 1, from the user perspective MITRE’s Java-based Collaborative Virtual Workspace (J-CVW) (Spellman et al. 1997) includes an integrated suite of facilities that enable synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, including text chat, audio and video conferencing, shared whiteboard, shared and private data spaces, and persistence of sessions via recording user interactions as they occur within the context of shared virtual rooms. CVW distinctively provides location independence and transparency as well as a room metaphor to support context management. For example, if we log on and ask to “join” Lowell, we are transported to his virtual location.
Figure 1. Java Collaborative Virtual Workspace (J-CVW)