• Henry Rothkopf - MITRE - henryr@mitre.org
• <coming soon from OMG Central>

Introduction: Henry Rothkopf presented a draft reference model for collaborative environments. See presentation internet-98-09-06 and internet-98-09-07. He pointed out that we now have a variety of asynchronous and synchronous collaboration technologies (e.g., MITRE CVW tool, DARPA JFACC Collaboration Services).

Towards a CSCW Framework: Why do we need a CSCW framework? We need a place to talk about the structure, behavior, and constraints in conferencing and collaboration, for example, a meeting with 30 postage stamp people in video talking all at once does not work very well.

What's in scope? Conferencing, chats, virtual meeting rooms, roles, various modalities, interaction protocols like conversations and gestures, …. For instance, we could say that a conference is a single medium collaboration. It provides a roster of participants and roles in their conference, media type, and access control. People have different visualizations of the task but can work together on the common view, for example in command posts where several kinds of information gathering, decisions, and calls for action must be coordinated.   One of the views of the CSCW Framework is as a capability maturity model showing increasing levels of sophistication.

Terminology: Collaboration terminology includes context, participant, sessions, conferences, roles, synchronous, asynchronous, (mixed) modality, agents, floor space, … Comment: It would be a useful pre-architecture step to develop an ontology of these terms, which would scope the CSCW area. Also, it always helps to define terms.

Supporting Services: Another useful step is to identify existing and needed OMG services that can support CSCW, as well as identifying new requirements and changes needed for existing services.

• existing: ECDTF Negotiation Service - an action item is to invite a presentation on this service. Promises are related to negotiation. Some work on agents overlaps here.
• existing: Workflow RFP Task and Session Services - defines user and workspace concepts - management of a session is important. Also mentioned was a need for transactions, not clear if ACID transactions are a primitive or whether a session notion is what is wanted.  What about nested sessions (as in nested transactions)?
• existing: Persistence
• existing: COS notification
• existing: Audio/Video Streaming
• existing: Security
• we need role-based extensions (as opposed to identity-based). There was a fair amount of discussion on this need. It was pointed out by some that security is optional in some collaborations and mandatory in others and by others that security is a key requirement that must be considered at the beginning.
• we might need multicast mixed with security
• we want non-repudiation on who participated in session and who said what.
• also needed: auditing, logging
• some of the work on BOF is historically relevant

Q&A

Q: How is the concept of space related to session? Meeting room, diagnostic center, war room, might have physical notion or virtual physical but there is also a logical notion of sessions.

Q: What do we mean by context? Context could exist unto itself without people in the room, or with agents …

Next Steps

The next meeting of CSCW WG will take place at OMG Burlingame on November 9, 1998.

• Henry will act as an initial editor for CSCW "documents:" glossary, list of services CSCW might depend on, framework.
• briefing on DARPA JFACC collaboration service framework
• briefing on ECDTF Negotiation Service
• strawman glossary/ontology of CSCW to help scope the area, define terms, and lead toward an initial framework/architecture for CSCW systems
• extend Henry's briefing to become a strawman reference architecture for the CSCW area to act as a guide in developing a roadmap for CSCW services and facilities that would be useful components in the construction of CSCW systems