Polymorphic collaboration in the global grid
William K. McQuay · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2006
Next generation collaborative systems must be able to represent the same information in different forms on a broad spectrum of devices and resources from low end personal digital assistants (PDA) to high performance computers (HPC). Users might be on a desktop then switch to a laptop and then to a PDA while accessing the global grid. The user preference profile for a collaboration session should be capable of moving with them as well as be automatically adjusted for the device type. Collaborative systems must be capable of representing the same information in many forms for different domains and on many devices and thus be polymorphic. Polymorphic collaboration will provide an ability for multiple heterogeneous resources (human to human, human to machine and machine to machine) to share information and activities, as well as the ability to regulate collaborative sessions based on client characteristics and needs; reuse user profiles, tool category choices, and settings in future collaboration session by same or different users; use intelligent agents to assist collaborative systems in learning user/resource preferences and behaviors, and autonomously derive optimal information to provide to users and decision makers. This paper discusses ongoing research in next generation collaborative environments with the goal of making electronic collaboration as easy to use as the telephone - collaboration at the touch of the screen.