| Project Description: |
[[[ This proposal should be considered as a placeholder, or a very
rough draft which will be refined in conjunction with the
Collaboration Whitepaper according to the following basic ground
rules:
a) We will participate in establishing 2 testbeds
1) Access Grid or equivalent High End
2) Real Networks or equivalent desktop
b) We have a general approach "Collaborative Portals" which is
particularly close to Gateway but builds on TangoInteractive
lessons. We want to understand what tools to integrate into this as we
and all other extensive projects we are aware have found some
reluctance to adopt collaborative tools.
c) We have some high level agreed goals: enable distance working
together on: Administrative requirements for Staff meetings, Standing
Committees, Focused meetings such as for Finance, Personnel,
Operations, Training, etc. and Technical requirements: Computational
requirements, Visualization requirements, Peer collaborations, etc.
d) We don't know how to implement these desires -- what type of
testbed, what type of tools, synchronous or asynchronous. So we need
a set of well defined experiments on test beds.
e) Integration of databases into collaborative portals figures
prominently in Administrative Collaboration. Also relevant to
other CTAs
f) Technical collaboration ought to include Collaborative visualization
using DICE
]]]
Some types of collaboration tools, both computer-based and not, are
already familiar to most people. The telephone and fax machine are
two examples of non-computer-based tools that facilitate synchronous
and asynchronous exchange of information (collaboration). E-mail, the
World Wide Web, and the various chat/instant message tools are
examples of computer-based collaboration tools (the first two being
asynchronous and the last synchronous). The current tools of
information technology make it possible to develop a wide variety of
other useful collaboration tools.
The application or purpose of the collaboration can be used to help
define the environment and appropriate toolset for a particular type
of collaboration. The PET program has quite successfully used
synchronous network-based collaboration tools to provide education and
training. This is a well-structured environment where the way in
which people interact with the tools is predictable and there is a
clear analogy with the familiar face-to-face classroom lecture. The
sharing of documents (proposals, documentation, reports,
presentations, etc.), archiving of e-mail traffic for group mailing
lists or discussion boards, and holding meetings or briefings might be
loosely termed "administrative" collaboration (though many of these
capabilities are equally useful in "technical" collaboration).
Administrative collaboration might be thought of as generally less
structured than education, and the analogy between the tools mentioned
above and the "traditional" way of doing things less clear. This can
make it harder gain user acceptance of the tools -- something which
has been experienced in the past within the PET program.
To increase flexibility, we emphasize modular tools, built where
possible from commodity technolgies, rather than the development of
specialized tools built specifically for a large one-off
framework. This component-oriented view is consistent with the
expected evolution of computing and information "portals" (such as the
Gateway project) describe elsewhere (NEED REFS). To increase user
acceptance, we will try to model the collaborative components as
closely as possible on processes and systems that will be familiar to
users.
Tools of particular interest in the context of administrative
collaboration can often be thought of as web-linked database systems:
o A document repository, which allows group members to store and
exchange documents quickly and easily. In an administrative context,
documents may be project proposals, technical reports, briefing
presentations, etc. In addition to web-database technology, recent
standards such as the W3C's WebDAV (distributed authoring and
versioning) will be investigated.
o The existing ARL web-based proposal and technical report system is a
specialized instance of a document repository, currently implemented
with a "flat file database". This system will be updated to match
the technology used in other components of the project, and as
appropriate integrated with the more general document repository.
o Mailing lists are a common way to communicate within a group, and a
searchable archive of mailing list traffic provides a convenient
"organizational memory", while allowing group members to use e-mail,
which is both convenient and familiar, as their primary means of
asynchronous communication. It can also be useful to provide a
simple, automated means for group members to create new mailing
lists and archives, though system administration and security
constraints may make this feature impractical at many sites.
Other tools, amounting in some sense to specialized document
repositories, are considered secondary in the context of this project,
but are further examples of useful tools for asynchronous
administrative collaboration: a "FAQ manager" to support group
development of "frequently asked questions" documents, and a "link
directory" to allow the group a structured way to share pointers to
relevant web-based information.
Together with the asynchronous tools described above, a number of
synchronous tools can also be useful help support distributed meetings
or briefings:
o Audio/video conferencing will use the "technical collaboration"
testbed environment when necessary. Much can also be done quite
easily using audio-only via traditional telephone conferencing.
o Since a wide range of documents today are published directly in a
web-compatible format, or can easily be converted to one, a shared
web browser is a useful tool for general document sharing. Other
tools, such as NetMeeting and VNC can also be useful to share
certain types of documents or displays.
o Chat or "instant messaging" tools can be useful in the running of
meetings or briefings, since they allow participants to quickly
share short text messages. This capability can be used to faciliate
moderation (i.e. reminding a speaker of a time limit) or meeting
flow (i.e. asking questions) without interrupting the speaker.
In this project, we propose to focus on the development of a testbed
deployment of the asynchronous web-database tools described above,
along with the shread browser. These tools will be made available to
PET and MSRC staff for use in both structured experiments and more
casual use. Userfeedback and an assessment of the level of usage of
the tools will be important results of this work, which will be used
to help refine our idea about administrative collaboration, the tools
themselves, and to guide wider deployment.
Though we are primarily talking these tools as standalone components
at present, it is also important to look forward to how they would be
integrated into an information or computing portal to provide
collaborative capablilities there. The web-linked database tools
described above will be implemented using current technologies which
are compatible with portals and "portalML", which is used to define
the user's interface to the portal. This work is synergistic with
ERDC- and ASC-sponsored Yr 5 efforts on portals and will help set the
stage for future testbed deployment of collaboration tools integrated
into information or computational portals as a natural evolution and
merger of concepts from collaboration and portal technology. It can
also be viewed as a pilot of the technologies required to construct
information-oriented portals, such as for IMT test data.
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