++ Aspects of Collaboration

Some notes from a brainstorm at Nottingham 2003-09-29

+++ Discovery

• of people
• of resources
• of activities

+++ Sharing data/information

such as:

• data (value & ref)
• database
• annotations and metadata (including provenance information)
• thoughts, plans, ideas
• scripts, workflows
• documents, articles
• programs, applications, websites (by ref), services (by ref)
• activity records

Note: may be useful to distinguish (to some extent) the kind of impersonal/anonymous 'collaboration' that occurs through e.g. shared use of public databases (the user and 'the community at large'), from more personal forms of collaboration, e.g. around 'my' database, or 'your' annotations (two individual users).

+++ Communication (person to person)

• sync and/or async
• various media: audio, video, text, etc.

+++ Coordination

• person to person
  • shared diary, scheduling
  • notification
  • awareness of activities
  • provenance

• application to application
  • data locks, updates
  • notification

+++ Shared interaction (person to application to person)

e.g.

• shared editing
• application or desktop sharing
• managing sessions, accounts, resource sharing

-- ChrisGreenhalgh - 30 Sep 2003

++ Thoughts on Notifications

The technical manifestation of a notification is equivalent to an Event, i.e. information describing something that has happened. It may have:

• an occasion (reason) for its occurance
  • passage of time
  • performance of some operation
    • an explicitly notifying operation (e.g. 'notify'
    • an instrumented operation (notification as side-effect)
• possibly an additional set of constraints to be satisfied before it is generated/published (e.g. that some particular kind of visible change has occurred)
• some information which it carries

In terms of the agents/users receiving a notification:

• they were (by definition) engaged in some other activity, which is interrupted by its receipt/occurance
• the notification may:
  • signal or invite a return to some previous activity or context, or
  • signal or invite the establishment of a new activity or context (esp. in a P2P/discovery scenario)

The notification client may be regarded as:

• scheduling the set of the received notifications, determining how/when they are presented to the user's attention (the 'scarce resource')

-- ChrisGreenhalgh - 30 Sep 2003

++ Collaborative aspects of myGrid

...

-- ChrisGreenhalgh - 30 Sep 2003