A Distributed Event Service for Adaptive Group Awareness

This paper is directly focused on the design of middleware functions to support a distributed cooperative authoring environment on the World Wide Web. Using the advanced storage and access functions of the PIÑAS middleware, co-authors can produce fragmented and replicated documents in a structured, consistent and efficient way. However, despite it provides elaborated, concerted, secure and parameterizable cooperative editing support and mechanisms, this kind of applications requires a suited and efficient inter-application communication service to design and implement flexible, efficient, and adapted group awareness functionalities. Thus, we developed a proof-of-concept implementation of a centralized version of a Distributed Event Management Service that allows to establish communication between cooperative applications, either in distributed or centralized mode. As an essential component for the development of cooperative environments, this Distributed Event Management Service allowed us to design an Adaptive Group Awareness Engine whose aim is to automatically deduce and adapt co-author’s cooperative environments to allow them collaborate closer. Thus, this user associated inference engine captures the application events corresponding to author’s actions, and uses its knowledge and rule bases, to detect co-author’s complementary or related work, specialists, or beginners, etc. Its final goal is to propose modifications to the author working environments, application interfaces, communication or interaction ways, etc.