The Session Capture and Replay Paradigm for Asynchronous Collaboration

In this paper, we describe a paradigm and its associated collaboration artifact to allow exible support for asynchronous collaboration. Under this paradigm, a user session with an application's user interface is encapsulated into a data artifact, referred to as a session object. Users collaborate by annotating, by modifying, and by a back-and-forth exchange of these session objects. Each session object is composed of several data streams that encapsulate audio annotations and user interactions with the application. The replay of a session object is accomplished by dispatching these data streams to the application for re-execution. Re-execution of these streams is kept synchronized to maintain faithfulness to the original recording. The basic mechanisms allow a participant who misses a session with an application to catch up on the activities that occurred during the session. This paper presents the paradigm, its applications, its design, and our preliminary experience with its use.