CoAKTinG:
Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid
Simon Buckingham Shum (KMi, Open
University) [Contact: sbs@acm.org]
David De Roure (IAM, University of Southampton)
Marc Eisenstadt (KMi, Open University)
Nigel Shadbolt (IAM, University of Southampton)
Austin Tate (AIAI, University of Edinburgh)
http://www.aktors.org/coakting/
The Advanced Knowledge
Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (AKT IRC: www.aktors.org)
is a 6 year, £7M project to develop knowledge management technologies, funded
by the UK’s EPSRC. The related CoAKTinG project,
recently funded as part of the UK’s e-Science Initiative on Grid computing [http://www.research-councils.ac.uk/escience/],
aims to integrate and adapt AKT technologies specifically to support
distributed scientific collaboration. As part of the AKT project’s conception
of the convergence of knowledge technologies and grid computing as the Semantic
Grid [www.SemanticGrid.org],
CoAKTinG will provide tools to assist scientific collaboration by integrating
intelligent meeting spaces, ontologically annotated media streams from online
meetings, decision rationale and group memory capture, meeting facilitation,
planning and coordination support, scholarly argumentation, and instant
messaging/presence.
These approaches are summarised below:
- Smart spaces. Scientists may wish
to be in a variety of places when they are in communication with remote
colleagues: experimental labs, meeting rooms, data analysis suites, or
travelling. This component of the project will be combining Access Grid
node spaces [http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/fl/accessgrid/ag-spaces.htm]
with smart devices that support a variety of broad and narrow bandwidth
connections to other people/devices. A smart space, as we conceive it,
will recognise significant events in a meeting and associate metadata with
the AV streams, described next, as well as enhancing shared presence.
- Ontologically annotated audio/video
streams. Few researchers have the time to sit and watch videos of
meetings; an AV record of an online meeting is thus only as useful as its
indexing. Moreover, indexing effort must negotiate the cost/benefit
tradeoff or it will not be done. Our prior work has developed ways to
associate ‘continuous metadata’ (of which one form is hyperlinks) in media
streams [Page and De Roure, 2001], capturing such events as slide
transitions and providing support for navigation. We will now be embedding
metadata grounded in one or more ontologies for scientific collaboration.
Additionally, decisions and key discussions (as captured in Compendium –
see below) can be recovered.
- Planning and coordination. We will
be building applications using I-X Intelligent Process Panels and its
underlying <I-N-CA> constraint-based ontology for processes and
products [Tate et al, 2002]. The process panels provide a simple interface
that acts as an intelligent “to do” list that is based on the handling of
issues, the performance of activity or the addition of constraints. It
also supports semantically “augmented” messaging and reporting between
panel users. A common ontology of processes and process or collaboration
products based on constraints on the collaborative activity or on the
alternative products being created via the collaboration is the heart of
this research. We envisage the creation of a library of process panels
configured to support the issues, options and constraints associated with
common types of meeting held by a given scientific group.
- Meeting facilitation/rationale and
group memory capture. Whilst meetings are a pervasive knowledge-based
activity in scientific life, they are also one of the hardest to do well.
“Meeting technologies” tend either to over-structure meetings (e.g. Group
Decision Support Systems), or ignore process altogether, and simply
digitize physical media (e.g. whiteboards) for capturing the products of
discussion. The Compendium
approach suite of tools occupies the hybrid middle-ground – ‘lightweight’
discussion structuring/mediation plus idea capture [Selvin et al, 2001],
with import and export to other document types.
- Enhanced presence management and
visualisation. The concept of presence
has moved beyond the ‘online/offline/away/busy/do-not-disturb’ set of
simple state indicators towards a rich blend of attributes that can be
used to characterise an individual's physical and/or spatial location,
work trajectory, time frame of reference, mental mood, goals, and
intentions. Our challenge is how best to characterise presence, how to
make it easy to manage and easy to visualise, and how to remain consistent
with the user's own expectations, work habits, and existing patterns of
Instant Messaging (IM) and other communication tool usage. Working on the Jabber open source
XML-based communications architecture, we will be extending its IM
capabilities with ‘ontology of presence’ and ‘knowledge profiles’. A
prototype called BuddySpace
[Eisenstadt, 2002] also adds visual and
map-based ‘buddy lists’ to display presence information that is mapped
onto visualisations, both geographical (e.g. a map of a building, or a
region), and conceptual (e.g. a workflow chart or project plan, a design
or experiment). The scale of the map can be altered to reflect anything
from global positioning, to school and workplace office layouts, to
experimental assemblies.
In the paper and presentation, we will present a scenario in
which these tools are combined to support scientific collaboration of various
types.
References
Eisenstadt, M, 2002. From Buddy Lists to Buddy Space:
Scaleable Experiences of InterPersonal Presence. Proceedings of the Presence
and Interworking Mobility Summit (PIM2002), March 19-21, 2002, Sophia
Antipolis, France. [www.pulver.com/pim/]
Page, K, Cruickshank, D and De Roure, D. (2001). It’s About
Time: Link Streams as Continuous Metadata. Proc The Twelfth ACM Conference on
Hypertext and Hypermedia (Hypertext '01) p.93-102. 2001. [http://www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk/projects/hystream/]
Selvin, A., Buckingham Shum, S., Sierhuis, M., Conklin, J.,
Zimmermann, B., Palus , C., Drath, W., Horth, D., Domingue, J., Motta, E. and
Li, G. (2001). Compendium: Making
Meetings into Knowledge Events. Knowledge
Technologies 2001, March 4-7, 2001, Austin TX [www.CompendiumInstitute.org]
Tate, A., Dalton, J. and Stader, J., 2002. I-P2 –
Intelligent Process Panels to Support Coalition Operations, Proceedings of the Second International
Conference on Knowledge Systems for Coalition Operations (KSCO-2002),
Toulouse, France, April 2002. [www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/]