Roberta Lima Gomes

LiCoB: Lightweight Collaborative Browsing

Collaborative navigation systems provide a useful way for virtual groups to share information through the web. However, the common set of features of these tools is not enough to offer a more face-to-face-like browsing experience. To fill this gap, this paper presents a novel collaborative navigation approach, which aims at integrating important features of a lightweight distributed architecture, awareness, session state sharing and annotations. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, LiCoB prototype was developed and then, evaluated considering performance issues.

Integrating collaborative applications with LEICA

Due to their unpredictable nature, collaboration activities are rarely supported by a single CSCW technology. Then different types of collaborative applications are usually applied in order to support group work such as collaborative e-learning. But in spite of being executed to accomplish a common collaboration task, these applications are executed independently without getting any advantage of each other. The integration of such applications would allow them to dynamically combine their different functionalities in a controlled way. In order to achieve integration, we propose LEICA, a loosely-coupled integration environment which allows collaborative applications to interact without loosing their autonomy. LEICA relies on the definition of collaboration policies for controlling the interactions between collaborative applications.

Collaborative virtual environments: going beyond virtual reality

With the growing demand for collaboration technologies, several CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) systems have been developed. CVEs (collaborative virtual environments) represent an important category of CSCW systems that generally make use of 3D shared space to provide collaboration facilities. However in most CVEs collaboration is restricted to the virtual reality context. In this paper, it is proposed to extend CVEs through the integration of different collaboration tools in order to allow collaboration to take place in different contexts (e.g. Web browsing), in a parallel and coordinated way with the virtual scene.

Biblioref: a semantic bibliographic reference management system

This paper presents Biblioref, a system that is meant to manage content from academic professionals. The main benefits of this system can be described as: a) promoting collaboration among users through mutual access to each others documents; b) granting user autonomy in knowledge organization, since documents are classified according to individual points of view instead of a centralized model; and c) providing mechanisms to relate the different users classification schemes, allowing to find potential collaborators, inferred from these relations. Moreover, Biblioref is Semantic Web compliant, opening possibilities for interoperating with other systems.

An Extensible Co-browsing Environment with Conference Support

This paper presents a proposal for integrating CoLab, our co-browsing system, with an audio- conference controller. In order to integrate these two applications, we adopted the integration environment for collaborative applications LEICA.

LEICA: loosely-coupled environment for integrating collaborative applications

Group activities generally involve several people presenting different collaborative tasks and requirements. Accordingly, collaboration is rarely supported by a single CSCW technology. Different types of collaborative applications are then applied in order to support group work. But in spite of being used with a common purpose, applications are executed independently. The integration of such applications would allow them to dynamically interoperate, combining their different functionalities in a controlled way. To achieve integration, we propose LEICA, a loosely-coupled integration environment which allows collaborative applications to interact without loosing their autonomy.

Regarding the Integration of Collaborative Applications into Virtual Worlds

In order to respond to the increasing demand for collaboration technologies, several Collaborative Virtual Environments have been proposed. However, most of them work independently of other collaboration tools, providing collaboration only inside their own shared virtual world. This work proposes the definition of a collaborative integration environment implementing a general framework for the integration of different collaborative applications with a conventional CVE. This integration aims to allow the collaboration activity to take place in several contexts in a parallel and coordinated way.

RS4IoT: a Recommender System for IoT

This paper presents RS4IoT, a recommendation web service for smart devices. RS4IoT provides an API to perform multi-attribute sensor recommendation tasks, in which client applications can inform which features the sensors to be recommended should contain. In addition, RS4IoT interacts with social networks to identify how certain sensors and actuators are evaluated by users and to gauge their importance in the recommendation. RS4IoT provides interoperability through an information model based on the W3C Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) standard.

ES-Aware: Energy and Stability Support for P2P Video Streaming on Mobile Devices

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has been used as a mean to deliver video streaming services over the Internet. Although mobile devices have been increasingly used to access multimedia content, P2P video streaming applications are still in early stage regarding these devices. The P2P protocol needs to be adapted to meet specific characteristics of mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a novel peer selection approach named Energy and Stability Aware (ES-Aware) which aims to reduce the impact of peers instability and the rapid battery drain. Our approach is implemented in a real P2P video streaming system called RapidStream [4]. Experiments are performed in a Internet-wide environment, PlanetLab [2] integrated with mobile devices, providing a comprehensive and purely experimental methodology to compare different techniques into a P2P video streaming protocol. Results suggest that (i) only the peer connected time is not sufficient as criterion for node stability; (ii) ES-Aware is more effective, saving around 57% of energy, for P2P networks with small percentage of mobile nodes.

Lightweight Collaborative Web Browsing

Collaborative navigation systems provide a useful way for virtual groups to share information through the web. However, the common set of features of these tools is not enough to offer a more face-to-face browsing experience. To fill in the gap, this paper presents a collaborative web browsing proposal, which integrates flexible session management, the maintenance of shared production spaces, and efficient communication facilities. The proposal relies on a collaboration ontology that provides a well-defined conceptualization and common vocabulary. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, the OCEAN prototype was developed and tested.