People collaborate in order to share information and solve problems: perhaps thousands of years ago speech evolved as a natural tool for cooperation. However, writing was invented as a technology for enlarging man's memory and communicating information asynchronously. Within the last fifty years, computers and networks have been invented to store vastly enlarged quantities of information, solve problems rapidly and communicate information and solutions to audiences, small or large. Collaborative computing is not new, since E-mail, newsgroups and file transfer have been gaining popularity over the last 15 years as ways of sharing information with other individuals and groups, and with indefinitely large audiences over unbounded timespans.

However, the introduction of multicasting, hypertext, audio and video encoding techniques and techniques for sharing windowing environments is providing enlarged technological support for collaborative problem solving. But the introduction of diverse collaborative computing solutions brings further problems: which is the best technology for solving a particular problem? Are there problems for which no collaborative solution exists, which can only be solved by physical and temporal collocation of the task force? In order to develop a mapping from human problems onto technological solutions it seems necessary first to define a set of problems which are usually amenable to group solution and perhaps provide a stepwise decomposition into functional primitives. This might then lead to classifying problems into their functional requirements, on the one hand, and collaborative tools into their functional solutions, on the other. A method may then be developed for selecting appropriate technological solutions. It may also be possible to classify problems which can be solved using collaborative computing technologies which have hitherto not been amenable to solution at all.

This section of the Evaluation Methodology document essays a classification of typical collaborative activities into domains in which functional characteristics can be identified. The Terms used in the remainder of the document are defined in 3.1 and Subsection 3.2 develops a view of the services which stand between tasks and technologies, to asist in providing a selection function for scenarios. Subsection 3.3 summarizes.

Definition of Terms

This Evaluation program is concerned with the three principle variables of task, technology and people. We know that people are the human actors who engage in collaborative activity, but what do we mean by task and technology? and are there levels of abstraction between them, or orthogonal to them?

We define task as a collaborative activity that a system might support. Service is defined as the capabilities of a system for providing support for a task. Technology is the hardware, software and interconnections that make it possible to instantiate a service. For example, a task is to hold a meeting. The services needed to support this are at a minimum: a synchronous mode for conversation, sharing of common documents, and single point of control of the session. One set of technologies to support this is: synchronous audio, shared display for briefing slides, and session management via E-mail to establish timing and the point of contact for the briefing slides.

A proposed taxonomy of Services is developed in the next subsection, in terms of capabilities and their abstractions.

Abstractions of Services

1. Awareness: Awareness of objects and their attributes. This ability can be specialized for the subtask to indicate the objects and attributes participants need access to, such as (people / availability to participate in collaboration), (people / areas of expertise), (documents / means of viewing), (applications / who can run), etc... Awareness can be maintained through such as the following:
   • Radar views.
   • Group versions of traditional widgets, such as multiuser scrollbars.
   • Graphical activity indicators.
   • Auditory cues.
2. Coordination (management), it relates to the mechanisms and rules established to use shared resources, such as:
   • Basic features: Concurrency control, access control, session establishment.
   • Technologies: Calendar and scheduling, workflow management, project management.
   • Linguistic Communication: Synchronous or Asynchronous; with 1 or multiple people; private or public; visible or invisible (i.e. do others know they are communicating)
3. Capabilities:
   • Human Communication (or Communication with Intelligent Agents)
   • Coordination/Collaboration Management (e.g. lecturing, brainstorming, command and control)
   • Integration (e.g. ability to move data/content between multiple services, translation between modalities)
   • Persistent Shared Object Manipulation (e.g. ASCII, 2D or 3D objects)
   • Archival and Review of Collaborations
   • Sharing Capabilities:
     • Shared Context (knowledge)
       • Awareness of how others are using shared objects
       • Shared workspaces
       • Visualization
     • Sharing (workspace), it relates to those tools that allow a shared input from participating team members, such as:
       • Realtime: Whiteboards, application sharing, meeting facilitation, Multi User Dungeons, virtual worlds.
       • Asynchronous: Information and document management, threaded discussions, hypertext.
     • Sharing Data, specifying: document type, who can see it, who can annotate it, who can modify it, for example:
     • Sharing a static document
     • Sharing a changing document in a Master-Slave mode (only one person can make changes, but multiple people can see the changes as they occur)
     • Sharing a changing document in Peer-to-Peer mode without shared objects (where everyone can add annotations to the document, but no one can change anyone else's annotations or the base document)
     • Sharing a changing document in Peer-to-Peer mode with some shared objects (where participants can change some of the objects in the document that they did not create, i.e. the base documents and others' changes)
     • Sharing a changing document in Peer-to-Peer mode with shared objects (where anyone can change any object in the document, including the base documents and others' changes)
4. Ability to establish a collaboration...
   with unlimited participants
   with a limited set of participants

5. Ability to review a prior collaboration...
   in which you were involved
   in which you were not involved
   for which you don't have all the tools used in the original collaboration

6. Ability to transport data using different channels of communication

7. Interactive (communication), it deals with means of communication and models of interaction among participants, such as:
   • Realtime: Audio and video conferencing.
   • Asynchronous: E-mail.
8. Integration, it relates to understanding the language format of other software packages, such as:
   • Links with the Web (i.e., recognition of html, java applets).
   • Links with user-specified editors (i.e., emacs, Microsoft Word, Wordperfect).
9. Object, it relates the use of icons to encapsulate functional behavior, such as:
   • a contained audio clip.
   • a contained video clip.
   • a contained document embedded with knowledge of the editor that created it.
10. Visualization (presentation), used to establish how participants, artifacts,and tools are displayed. It includes the aspects such as WYSIWIS and man-machine interaction, such as:
    • Windowing capabilities across platforms.
    • 2D and 3D presentation capabilities.
11. Participation (. . . to User Interface), it defines mechanisms that determine how participants interact with the application, such as:
    • Help menus.
    • Tutorials.
    • Directive error messaging.

EWG/ICV Home