Our proposed work is related to and will build on a variety of
previous research efforts.
We outline below the nature of some of the related works and
how we will extend them:
Specific collaboration services:
Several research projects,
both within and outside our group,
have researched the individual collaboration services
we will support in the bus.
However,
these efforts have
explored these services within limited domains.
For instance,
Prof. Jeffay's research on
on real-time computing has been limited to
audio and video,
and Prof. Dewan's research on flexible coupling
has been limited to textual user-interfaces.
In this project,
we will generalize the domain of the individual services so that
arbitrary services can be combined with each other,
thereby exploring,
for instance,
real-time,
coupling,
services for supporting shared virtual environments.
Direct integration experiments:
Our group has recently conducted several experiments to explore
direct interoperation between
specific collaboration systems.
In particular,
we have integrated Suite,
a collaboration toolkit developed by Prof. Dewan at Purdue and UNC,
with (a) XTV,
a shared window system developed by Prof. Wahab and Jeffay at UNC and ODU,
(b) Trellis,
a petri-net based collaboration system developed by Prof. Stotts at
University of Maryland and UNC,
(c) DistEdit,
a collaborative text editor developed by Prof. Prakash at University
of Michigan,
and (d) HTML-based Web browsers.
We will expand this research by
providing indirect connection, via the bus, among interoperating systems,
thereby requiring a single connection from an existing system to the bus
rather than a
a cross-translation module for every
different pair of
systems that might want to interoperate.
Generic interconnection technology:
Prof. Stotts is exploring the use of the Polylith software bus
for composing collaborative virtual environments from existing
Polylith in an example of a generic technology for interconnecting arbitrary distributed applications. Our work will extend such technology with higher-level abstractions that make it easier to interconnect those distributed applications that support collaboration.
Our previous integration experiments will give us baseline data for determining improvements obtained with the bus.