Scientific project
The Motu system allows a
virtual team to
share
data supporting in the mean time
awareness. It appears to be
a tool such as
BSCW,
TeamScope
or
SourceForge. It includes an awareness
system within a shared data manager. The Motu system distinguish itself
with its richer awareness system as a sharper and a more active detection
of users activity, indeed users are informed live.
Motu system overview
The Motu system must allow a virtual team
to share data supporting in the mean time awareness.
-
Virtual team : group of people who work across space, time and organizational
boundaries to reach the same goal. Nowadays we can easly imagine companies
such as Bull, IBM and Hitachi Japan delegate few engineers in one
of these teams to work in new technologies which need intelligence spread
throughout the world and time zone.
-
Data sharing : a shared data manager must allow the team to :
-
Store documents which will be available for all the members : meta-data,
deployment facilities.
-
Guarantee the changes following : Who did what ? When ? Why ?
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Guarantee the security and the data protection : authentification, integrity,
non-repudiation, confidentiality, access right.
-
Guarantee data existance and maintenance: storage and resistance to breakdown.
These features are today
enrolled in distributed configuration management tools like:
ClearCase,
Continuus,
CVS
servers or sharper tools like electronic documents management.
-
Awareness : Awareness : When a few people work simultaneously on
the same data, the real problem in this case is coordination between these
users. One possible solution is to inform each members about past, current
and incoming events (time distribution). Yet, we must be able to synthetize
judicious and acceptable information. Awareness could be shown in
many ways : to be aware of the presence with tools like ICQ
or AOL messenger, to be aware of the activity with logging tools, notifications,
processes awareness with tools such as workflow
etc.
Motu system current state
The prototype contains more than 400 Java classes.
It manage multiversioned et shared file system. The file manager is tolerant
to breakdown and it also manages access right (ACL).An event system has
been built in the file manager to notify users about any past and current
occured changes. A presence manager has also been set in the prototype
as well as a few groupware tools as : instant messages, chat, Visio-conf...
A graphical interface allows the users' prototype
to work easily on the files and to be aware meanwhile about the others'
activity instantly.
Contact :
