The milestones and the approximate associated costs are summarized below. The table shows when different collaboration services will be incorporated into the bus, when experiments will be carried out to demonstrate the interoperability among software systems providing these services, and the expected cost of carrying out these tasks.
We will incorporate and experiment with these services in three stages. In the first stage, we will support application-independent aspects of our work such as session management and awareness support and conduct experiments that allow interoperability among different implementations of these services. Next, we will support application-dependent services for enabling real-time collaboration among interoperating systems. These services include support for a general data and user-interface model and mechanisms for real-time coupling of application-dependent data and user-interface objects. We will then investigate application-dependent services for controlling the collaboration among users to ensure that unauthorized and inconsistent operations are not performed on the interoperating applications.
we will study replication and migration mechanisms that ensure that connection through the bus does not unduly affect the performance of the interconnecting processes and access control mechanisms for ensuring that operations on the the bus itself are also protected.
The equipment cost shown below includes the cost of two SGI Indigo2 Maximum Impact workstations ($40,000 cost per unit), which will facilitate the study of collaborative virtual environments.
Milestone Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Total
Acquire and install new equipment 40,000 40,000 80,000
and Integration Scenarios
Session management and awareness (Wahab) 50,000 50,000 50,000
Data and UI model (Stotts) 50,000 50,000 50,000
Real-Time Services (Jeffay) 50,000 50,000 50,000
Sharing mechanisms (Dewan) 50,000 50,000
Concurrency and access control services (Smith) 50,000 50,000
Bus replication/migration mechanisms (Dewan) 50,000
Bus security (McHugh) 50,000 50,000 50,000
Total $340,000 $340,000 $300,000 $980,000
Each milestone corresponds to a function we propose to add in the bus. Included in the work associated with the milestone is the cost of implementing the function, interfacing clients/providers of that service to the bus, performing experiments involving the function, and producing reports and videos involving this work. Next to each milestone we have given the name of the faculty member who will lead the research of that function.