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Creating Awareness with Subscription Services (CASS) Strategy
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Meta Information
Current awareness technologies provide minimal support for users who are trying to discover what information is monitored which might affect their work. An important goal of any awareness technology is to make the user aware of what information can be subscribed to; to provide meta information about the notifications that they can receive. This not only tells the user if the information that they were looking for is monitored, but supports browsing for other types of information that can affect a user's work.
Meta Information Type 1: Information Source List
To support the users in finding information that they can monitor, the most important information that they need is to know what information sources are available. Can they monitor a document, a calendar, a webcam? Users need to be able to browse through these information sources not just to find the information source that they opened the tool to find, but also to explore and find new sources of information that can help them. This capability is shown in the top left corner of the screen shot below where a list of monitored file systems are shown.
Meta Information Type 2: Object Hierarchy
An information source sends a hierarchical list monitored entities and properties to CASSIUS. These entities and properties are refered to as objects in this work. This object hierarchy enables users to browse and select the aspects of information in an information source that they want to monitor. In the case of a WebDAV server, this hierarchy could consist first of a hierarchy of files and folders. The WebDAV server may also add other elements to the hierarchy of monitored objects such as the load on the server, number of hits per hour or day, and other such statistics.
A document may have an object hierarchy that consists of the sections and subsections of the document, enabling users to select the specific section of the document that they want to monitor. By having the hierarchy reflect the nature of the information source, browsing is greatly simplified for the people who work with the information source. It does however require that when a section of a document is moved or a WebDAV file is moved that the object hierarchy stored in the CASSIUS server is updated.
This capability is represented in the screen shot below by a user selecting among the files and folders in the second column and the subscription being designed in the pane directly below the file hierarchy.
Meta Information Type 3: Events
The information source sends a list of events to CASSIUS. This list consists of all events that can affect each type of monitored object within the object hierarchy. This allows users to further refine their subscription to only look at certain types of events, changes, occurances, etc... This is represented in the screen shot below on the right column, where the selection is also added to the subscription formula being designed below the file/object hierarchy..
Research Staff Michael Kantor
Professor David F. Redmiles
Institute for Software Research
Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
CA 92697-3425
E-mail: mkantor@ics.uci.edu
E-mail: redmiles@ics.uci.edu