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From: surfpunk@osc.versant.com (pbyynobengvir zbqnyvgl genafvgvbaf)
To: surfpunk@osc.versant.com (SURFPUNK Technical Journal)
Subject: [surfpunk-0037] THESIS: meta-information sharing in collaboration support environments
Keywords: surfpunk, computer-supported cooperative work, meta-information

+                        + a. Hydrogen cracking will be performed by
                         +    trailing a large recepticle for containment
                         +    of water behind the AUtopia, where the solar
                         +    units will generate the electricity for
                         +    separate the hydogen from the water by
                         +    process of electrolosis.
                         +                 -- AUtopia manifesto
                         +                    wixer!autopia@cs.utexas.edu
                         +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The body of this proposal passed "fmt" without the slightest change.
The proposer obviously uses "vi"!                          -- strick
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     META-INFORMATION SHARING IN COLLABORATION SUPPORT ENVIRONMENTS

                         Ph.D. Thesis Proposal
                            W. Keith Edwards
                         College of Computing
               Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center
                 [ Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Georgia, USA ]

                             Committee:
                       John Stasko (Advisor)
                            James Foley
            David Gedye (Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Inc.)
                           Scott Hudson
                           Daryl Lawton

                    Tuesday, February 2, 1993
                             5:00 PM
                  College of Computing, Room 155



ABSTRACT

Computer-supported cooperative work, or CSCW, is an emerging area of
both research and commercial interest which is concerned with the use
of computers to support and enhance the work activities of groups.
Collaborative applications are notoriously hard to build however.  As
Grudin says, "the design process fails because [developers'] intuitions
are poor for multi-user applications."

A number of characteristics of collaborative applications contribute to
their intractability.  These include the multi-user nature of such
systems (requiring application developers to maintain serialization and
synchronization among multiple event streams), the requirement for
fine-grained access control, the need for flexible session management,
and the potentially distributed nature of collaborative applications.

The goal of this proposed research is create a framework to enable the
easier creation of robust, flexible, multi-user collaborative
applications.  I believe that it is possible to draw a distinction
between two classes of information sharing in collaborative
applications, and that by drawing such a distinction it is possible to
gain insight into ways to support collaborative systems both at
development time and run-time.  These two sharing classes are
application information sharing and meta-information sharing.
Application information sharing is the "classical" form of sharing and
involves sharing application-internal data in a collaborative session.
Meta-information sharing is the sharing of information used to
facilitate the process of collaboration itself; it is the sharing of
information used by the underlying collaboration support environment.

I hypothesize that by drawing this distinction and focusing on various
aspects of meta-information sharing, it will be possible to
significantly enhance the development process and run-time flexibility
of collaborative applications.  In this talk I shall discuss the
distinction in types of sharing and explain why I have focused on this
one type of information sharing.  I will specifically examine four
specific objectives of this research which involve the sharing of
meta-information:  session management, user representations in a
collaborative system, policy expression, and modality transitions
between synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.

---
keith edwards                                   keith.edwards@gvu.gatech.edu
multimedia computing group / georgia tech       404.894.6266
graphics, visualization, & usability center     atlanta, ga  30332-0280


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                      XIO:  fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe) on X server
                            "unix:0.0" after 38 requests (33 known
                            processed) with 0 events remaining.  The
                            connection was probably broken by a server
                            shutdown or KillClient.


