WWW-Based Collaboration Environments with Distributed Tool Services

WWWbased Collab oration Environments with Distributed To ol Services Gail E Kaiser Stephen E Dossick Wenyu Jiang Jack Jingshuang Yang SonnyXiYe Columbia University Department of Computer Science Amsterdam Avenue Mail Co de New York NY UNITED STATES fax kaisercscolumbiaedu CUCS February Abstract Wehave develop ed an architecture and realization of a framework for hyp ermedia collab oration environments that supp ort purp oseful work by orchestrated teams The hyp ermedia represents all plausible multimedia artifacts concerned with the collab orative tasks at hand that can b e placed or generated online from applicationsp ecic materials eg source co de chip layouts blueprints to formal do cumentation to digital library resources to informal email and chat transcripts The environment capabilities include b oth internal hyp ertext and external link server links among these artifacts which can b e added incrementally as useful connections are discovered pro jectsp ecic hyp ermedia search and browsing automated construction of artifacts and hyp erlinks according to the semantics of the group and individual tasks and the overall pro cess workow application of to ols to the artifacts and collab orativework for geographically disp ersed teams We present a general architecture for what wecallhyp ermedia subwebs and imp osition of groupspace services op erating on shared subwebs based on World Wide Web technology which could b e applied over the Internet andor within an organizational intranet We describ e our realization in OzWeb which reuses ob jectoriented data management for applicationsp ecic subweb organization and workow enactmentand co op erative transactions as builtin groupspace services whichwere originally develop ed for the Oz pro cess ware developmentenvironment framework Further we present a general architecture for a centered soft WWWbased distributed to ol launching service This service is implemented by the generic Rivendell comp onent which could b e employed in a standalone manner but has b een integrated into OzWeb as an example foreign ie addon groupspace service Keywords Computersupp orted co op erativework Environment frameworks Hyp ermedia Pro cess To ols Transactions Workow INTRODUCTION In general col laboration environments seek to improve endresult quality and team pro ductivity during b oth prearranged and ad hoc group activities and pro jects ranging from industrial decision supp ort and mili tary command and control to healthcare management and delivery to software engineering and engineering design to publishing and education to crisis management and emergency resp onse Collab oration envi ronments assist information workers b oth individually and together in a group via data organization and search co ordination of concurrent access pro cess workow mo deling and enactment application program launching and other services Collab oration environment frameworks provide generic facilities that can easily and rapidly b e tailored to a sp ecic eort Hypermedia collab oration environments intertwine supp ort for planning and execution of purp oseful work by assisting information workers in generating discovering retrieving up dating crossreferencing and exploiting all online materials that may plausibly b e relevant to an endeavor The conventional applicationsp ecic artifacts eg press releases and intelligence rep orts formally pro duced and consulted during the conduct of a pro ject may make up only a small prop ortion of the relevanthyp ermedia There could also b e arbitrary informal do cuments such as email and newsgroup archives meeting minutes p erhaps including video and audio comp onents even scannedin diagrams sketched on napkins as well as traces of the pro cess that has b een followed to date during the pro ject with various analyses and metrics regarding the progress of the ad hoc eorts may b e slowed down particularly during their initial eort Without such broad supp ort stages due to lack of organized information access Further the do cumentation available after pro ject completion may not include all the nitty details that came up during meetings email discussion groups etc apparent minutiae some of whichmay later b e quite valuable for desiderata and p ostmortem analysis has likely b een lost Hyp ermedia materials need not reside in a single rep ository constructed sp ecically for that pro ject or internal to the encompassing organization but could p otentially reference do cuments from arbitrary external sources and even add on links b etween external data of arbitrary typ es whose native rep ositories or formats provide no hyp erlink capabilities Endusers and the environments task engine should b e able to intro duce links on top of and orthogonal to anyhyp erlinks emb edded in do cuments by the authors to add references to materials the authors never thought of did not know ab out or that did not exist when the do cuments were written Note this p ermits hyp erlinking materials generated and managed independently from the collab orative activity such as digital library publications technical rep orts from unrelated institutions that provided inspiration or insights videos or transcripts of seminars or television presentations with some b earing on the work public resources etc These features are particularly useful for activities whose participating organizations andor information resources must b e drawn together quickly with limited time to set up a pro jectsp ecic database and reformat existing data as hyp ermedia This is very nearly what the World Wide Web WWW provides Thus wecho ose Web technology particu larly Hyp erText Transfer Proto col HTTP and Hyp erText Markup Language HTML as the infrastructure on which to construct hyp ermedia collab oration environments Web technology can b e applied within an organizational intranet with references to external resources tunneled through rewalls ob viouslypro prietary or secret materials would not b e made publicly available on the Internet However Web technology alone or in tandem with other distributed computing infrastructures eg DCE OLE CORBA do es not provide the services necessary for collab oration There is little organization of Web do cuments a great advantage for generic use but consequently pro jectsp ecic navigation and search are challenging Although new Web pages can b e created with We use the terms pro cess and workow interchangeably throughout this pap er ignoring the quibble that workows are generally relatively short and a longlived pro cess may encompass manyworkows links to do cuments elsewhere on the Web there is no general way to add on applicationsp ecic typ es attributes and links to arbitrary materials Applicationsp ecic organization would provide a common context for collab orative information sharing There is no supp ort for workow mo deling and enactment regarding access to Web pages A workow engine can present to users and guide and assist them in following a medical care plan design pro cess business practice etc whose information comp onents are stored as Web hyp ermedia Workowwould provide a structured means for co ordinating the roles that participants take in collab orative tasks Although the Web may soon support versioning and conguration management following the checkout mo del there is little concept of transactions with either the classical atomicity consistency isolation and durability prop erties or p ermitting relaxations prop osed for longduration interactive andor co op erativework The rst author argues in why the checkout mo del is less attractive for collab orative eorts than the emerging variety of co op erative transaction mo dels Concurrency control of some sort is a key requirement for managing concurrent access to shared information Both collab orative and solo work involve more than browsing of HTML do cuments artifacts stored in hyp ermedia collab oration environments come in many dierent formats There is no standard means of using these disparate forms of information once found particularly as inputs to to ols Software to ols and application programs are to information workers as the hammer and chisel are to the carp enter essential comp onents in accomplishing the tasks required by their work Imagine telling a carp enter that some of her favorite to ols could only b e used on a sp ecic style of workb ench and other to ols she uses every daycan only b e used on a dierentstyle of workb ench and a third set of to ols are only available on a particular workb ench lo cated in a neighb oring city Users of collab oration environments face an analogous problem To treat the Web as a rep ository for hyp ermedia collab oration environments it is necessary to apply b oth conventional to ols do cument editors spreadsheets virtual whiteb oards etc and emerging Webaware to ols HTML editors emailers etc to Web entities and place to ol results backonto the Web Many useful to ols run only on particular computing platforms eg Solaris versus Windows and economic constraints may restrict licensing to a particular host b ecause either the hardware or software is very exp ensive eg a Craynumerical analysis package making it dicult to integrate the use of these to ols with a users task at hand preferably p erformed sitting at that users oce workstation or on a mobile host in the eld All these hurdles get in the users way They must rememb er not only where they can run certain to ols but also the sp ecics on starting them including environmentvariables needed command line options etc A distributed

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