Orbit: A Next Generation Collaboration Environment

James Milligan and Carla Burns, Air Force Research Laboratory Information, Technology Division (AFRL/IFTD)

Introduction

The Information Age of this century has allowed communication technology to boldly go well beyond those of the past. Cellular phones, beepers, personal workstations, computer networks, and the Internet have all contributed to the Information Age. Some of today’s technologies are aimed at providing collaboration support for the workday activities of distributed groups. These activities may include communication, cooperation, problem solving and/or negotiation and may be directed towards almost any application including telemedicine, Command and Control, and software development/evolution. While existing collaboration environments have come a long way in providing capabilities to support group work, issues such as usability, flexibility and interoperability remain. The Orbit work aims to overcome such obstacles through the development of a next generation collaboration environment. Three key elements contribute to Orbit’s approach for a next generation collaboration environment:

1. a theoretical framework based on groupwork in complex domains;

2. a multi-functional, open architectural framework for support of collaboration activities and the theoretical framework; and

3. powerful data visualization facilities which improve user understanding.

The Theoretical Framework of Orbit: Locales

Orbit’s theoretical framework is based upon the work of sociologist Anselm Strauss and his notion of social worlds [1, 2]. Strauss’ social world model addresses the understanding, analysis and reasoning about group work in complex domains. The Orbit work takes many of the social concepts in Strauss’ model and applies them to support collaboration activities through networks of computers using locales. Locales are virtual places for group work situated in the computer network. Strauss’ work was selected as the theoretical basis for Orbit due its support of the following group work concepts: displaced action as the central focus of work, admitted flexibility and contingency of work and equal weight of formal and informal aspects of work.

The locales framework integrates five principles necessary for distributed group collaboration. These principles are locale foundations, mutuality, individual views, interaction trajectories, and civic structures. A locale can be thought of as a focal point around which to define, structure, and relate the relevant people, objects, tools, and resources germane to a particular collaboration activity. The locales foundations principle captures the basic domain structuring and furnishing of work. Locale foundations are therefore about a) providing adequate media and mechanisms in available domains to support the sharing of objects, tools, and resources, b) supporting a group’s notion of membership and related processes, and c) facilitating appropriate privacy and access mechanisms.

The civic structure principle deals with facilitating interaction with the wider community beyond an individual’s immediate workgroups and locales. It includes the lifecycle processes that support the emergence and dissolution of locales and the structuring of the world of locales in the broader sense. This is where external influences beyond the locales of direct interest can be considered (e.g. organizational, professional, financial, and political).

The trajectory principle is concerned with all of the temporal aspects of the group’s locale, its associated individuals and entities. It also deals with the phasing, articulation and management of interactions. The mutuality principle concerns the degree to which awareness and presence must be supported in the collaborative work. The mutuality principle is important for both synchronous and asynchronous interactions, although the medium of expression might be very different.

Finally, the individual view principle looks at the different individual views of the same locale and the individual views over multiple locales. While there may be a group definition of the locale, the individuals in the group may all have a different view of, or interest in the locale based on their current level of involvement. Moreover, few individuals have the luxury of being able to focus on a single task exclusively. They usually belong to multiple social worlds and work on many different tasks concurrently, with varying (and shifting) degrees of intensity.

The Orbit Environment: Multi-functional and Open Architecture

The Orbit environment provides collaboration tools that support the locales theoretical framework which is guided by the five principles discussed above. It allows spontaneous generation and evolution of networks of locales. Each locale is dedicated to a particular purpose and furnished with the artifacts and tools required for distributed workgroups to effectively accomplish the task at hand. When groups are work-ing they need the following [3]:

• The family of artifacts that make up the formal layer of their work activities. Examples include program files, medical records, yellow stickies, etc.

• The tools that are used to manipulate these artifacts. Examples include compilers, editors, pens, etc.

• Resources for effective communication that grant members of the social world the ability to communicate appropriately to the task at hand.

• Automation of mundane tasks, such as change notification.

• The ability to navigate. That is, to seamlessly switch among multiple on-going tasks, interrelate them as appropriate, and find tasks and people as needed.

The environment emphasizes flexible coordination and communication, and can be easily integrated with workgroup repositories, artifacts and tools as well as other workgroup management systems. Key features of the environment include a ubiquitous collaborative desktop, wide-area scalable collaboration infrastructure, synchronous and asynchronous group support, user-controlled projection of presence and awareness and pervasive audio/video capabilities. Figure 1 provides an illustration of the Orbit environment. The Orbit user interface shown in the figure, consists of a locale navigator and a locale workspace. The navigator permits configuration of locales, objects, documents and shared audio/video conferencing. The workspace provides capabilities for viewing and manipulating shared repository artifacts.

Orbit is based on a three-layer conceptual model that implements locales and individual views based on the external objects in the lowest layer. The locales layer groups objects and tools together and provides support for presence, awareness and trajectory information. The individual views layer provides the user with vision into multiple locales simultaneously and with varying degrees of intensity. The system provides a ubiquitous collaborative desktop through which users can perform all shared and individual tasks. Figure 2 presents an illustration of Orbit’s conceptual architecture.

The Data Visualization Capabilities of Orbit: Virtue

In the physical world, individuals react directly with their daily environments. The Orbit environment provides powerful data visualization capabilities that immerse the individual into his/her domain. This component is called Virtue. To date, Virtue has been applied to the system engineering arena by providing a direct manipulation interface for exploring software structure, evolution, and behavior dynamics. Key capabilities of the Virtue component include shared 3D views of software structure and history, virtual tools for exploring data visualizations, multimedia annotations for spatio-temporal marking, tactile feedback for grasping and manipulation and voice command for unencumbered interaction. The actions of each Virtue user are reflected in all other coupled virtual spaces. Future work will explore the application of Virtue to other application domains such as telemedicine and Command and Control.

Acknowledgments

The Orbit and Virtue work is currently being sponsored by the DARPA Evolutionary Design of Complex Systems (EDCS) Program and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Information Technology Division. Additional sources of sponsorship for the work have been provided by the DARPA Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization and Software Environments Programs, the US Army Construction Engineering Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel and Fujitsu Open Systems Solutions.

Additional Information

Further information on Orbit can be found at: www.dstc.edu.au/worlds

Further information on Virtue can be found at: www-pablo.cs.uiuc.edu/Project/VR/NEWVROverview.htm

About the Author

Author Contact Information

James Milligan has been a computer scientist with Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) for 14 years where he has directed research and development activities in software engineering. He is currently the AFRL Program Manager for the Evolutionary Design of Complex Software (EDCS) Program. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) School of Technology, and is currently finalizing his M.S. in Software Development and Management through Rochester Institute of Technology. Carla Burns has been a computer scientist with Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) for 13 years where she has directed research and development activities in software engineering in the areas of requirements engineering, rapid prototyping, and scenario generation. She received her B.S. in Mathematics from Clarkson University and a M.S. in Computer Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) Institute of Technology.

James Milligan Air Force Research Laboratory Information Technology Division 525 Brooks Road Rome, NY 13441-4505 [email protected] Carla Burns Air Force Research Laboratory Information Technology Division 525 Brooks Road Rome, NY 13441-4505 [email protected]

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