Simon Buckingham Shum (Open)David De Roure (So’ton)Marc Eisenstadt (Open)Nigel Shadbolt (So’ton)

Austin Tate (Edin)

AKT Review, Sept. 2003

AKT Integrated Feasibility Demonstrator

CoAKTinG partners (AKT subset)

Overview

Component approaches Edinburgh / Open U. / Southampton

Integration>> advances that would never have happened without this project <<

Conceptual Technical

Key contributions and future work

Beyond video conferencing…

collective sensemaking /

discussion capture

following through decisions/coordinating activities

synthesising artifacts

recovering information from meetings

awareness of agent status /

sense of ‘presence’virtual meetings

…integrating multiple modes of collaboration

‘Presence’ semantics

… as an aggregated view of an (object)’s dynamically changing attributes (Chakraborty, 2001)

Availability (“I’m logged on for a videoconference”) Preference (“Only my boss can interrupt me now”) Capability (“My device can accept video calls”) Location (“I’m in Munich… urgent calls only”)

awareness ofagent status /

sense of ‘presence’

Presence visualization

Beyond ‘buddy lists’

Geographic and conceptual maps

Other instant messaging features make it the most downloaded Jabber client

Compendium “I see what you’re saying”

Connecting ideas: visually, by sets, metadata, and hypertextually

Real time visual mapping of issues, ideas, arguments and decisions in meetings

Multimedia webs of resources and discussions Incremental formalization with shared ownership Free-form and template driven discussions

collective sensemaking /

discussion capture

Scenario Building: Mapping argumentsand decision rationale

Compendium: structured template

Compendium: meeting template

I-X Process Panels I-X environment: handling issues, performing

activities, placing constraints, adding annotations

Based on a synthesis-task ontology <I-N-C-A> Role in CoAKTinG: networked ‘To Do’ lists for

issue handling and activity tracking

following through decisions/coordinating activities

synthesising artifacts

I-X meeting action items Process Panel

HyStream

Continuous metadata

• Metadata annotation of continuous media

• e.g. Hystream project• application of open hypermedia to streamed,

temporal media• continuous link flows: link generation,

storage, synchronised transmission, delivery and resolution

Interim Results

Integration work

Conceptual Extending the AKT Reference Ontology Mapping and cross-fertilisation between two

issue-management ontologies Technical

Off-the-shelf Jabber-based integration 3 tools freely available for download Intelligent team rosta management Integration between Compendium,

I-X, BuddySpace, Meeting replay tool

Key Contributions• Support variable levels of formality in communication• Real time semantic annotation of discussions• Events ontology for e-Science collaboration• Context-driven collaboration tools

Conceptual integration:Extending the Reference Ontology

Extensions to support:• generation of multimedia presentations (e.g.

millisecond representations of time)

• meetings distributed across several (physical and virtual) locations

• exhibition of information objects as events (e.g. slides; videos; documents)

• meeting-specific (compound) information bearing objects (versions of resources used in meetings)

• annotation events (e.g. verbal comments, creation of Compendium nodes)

Conceptual integration: Issue-based ontologies

IBIS: Issue-Based Information System (optimised for synchronous discussion and mapping in Compendium) Issues, Positions, Arguments, Decisions, Reference

Nodes

<I-N-C-A> (optimised for asynchronous coordination of activities in I-X Process Panels) Issues, Nodes, Constraints, Annotations

Where appropriate, one brings in a Compendium template (e.g. I-X Plans) to support structured work

IBIS-inspired extensions to <I-N-C-A>

• Deontic questions - What should we do?

• Instrumental questions - How should we do it?

• Criterial questions - What are the criteria?

• Meaning or conceptual questions - What does X mean?

• Factual questions - What is X? or Is X true?

• Background questions - What is the background to this project?

• Stakeholder questions - Who are the stakeholders of this project?

Technical integration: Jabber interoperability

BuddySpace

Compendium

I-X Process panels

Meeting Replay

BuddySpace

Compendium

I-X Process panels

Jabber Server

Technical integration: Compendium I-X Plan

virtual meetings

Semantic replay/browsing of meetings… Video stream <event> <event> <event> …

Speech event stream <event> <event> <event> …

Jabber event stream <event> <event> <event> …

Slide event stream <event> <event> <event> …

Compendium event stream <event> <event> <event> …

How to integrate into a coherent meeting replay user interface?

recovering information from meetings

Application event stream <event> <event> <event> …

mapping real time discussions/ group

sensemaking

following through decisions/coordinating activities

synthesising artifacts

recovering information from meetings

awareness ofcolleagues’

availability/ sense of ‘presence’virtual meetings

Testbed: Scientific project management (AKT PI NetMeeting, March 2003)

recovering information from meetings

NetMeeting

BuddySpace

Compendium

I-X Process panels

Meeting replay by time, speaker, contribution to discussion, and decision

Future work The CSCW graveyard…

…users will consider any required adaptation a cost…services need to justify themselves

Semantics Co-existence and merging of issue ontologies Dynamic context for agents, processes and products

Meeting replay/navigation As the corpus grows, need for dynamic generation of

views across meetings and themes user interface and engineering challenges – poss. Equator collaboration

Towards hybrid semantic annotationhuman sensemaking + analysis/IE on the RDF repository

Domain testbeds Scientific project management (AKT)

Work with Comb-e-Chem e-Science project Dynamic e-Response emergency relief scenario

www.aktors.org/coakting