Creating Awareness with Subscription Services

Introduction

The "Creating Awareness with Subscription Services" (CASS) strategy is an approach for creating a ubiquitous awareness environment. The goal is to enhance people's ability to coordinate with other people, groups, organizations, software, and other aspects of their work and social environments.

At the center of this awareness environment is a notification server (which I also call an awareness server), which routes awareness information from a wide variety of sources of information to the users who will be affected by the information. While others have used notification servers to transmit awareness information, they have used servers designed for software interoperability rather than awareness. The contributions of this work focus on determining and evaluating a set of services needed to provide an awareness environment that is both useful and usable; a human centered approach to designing not just software, but the environments on which the software will be built upon. While other approaches provide awareness information to users, the CASS approach provides the following advantages:

Notifications of changes can be sent from any source of awareness information to any awareness tool implemented within the CASS framework.
Any awareness tool can interpret the notifications it receives regardless of what kind of information source it originated from. It can provide a representation of the information received within the limitations of its awareness style.
Users can choose an awareness style that suits their work practices and work environment.
Users are presented meta information describing what information sources they can subscribe to, what objects and properties are monitored for changes by the information source, and what types of events can affect those objects and properties. Using this information, users can browse to find and subscribe to all of the types of information that will help them engage in their work
Information overload is avoided by allowing users to route less important information to awareness styles that generate relatively little cognitive load.

More Information

Awareness Tools: Describes the awareness tools that come with the software, others that are planned, and a description of the task of building awareness tools.
Awareness styles: Every awareness tool has a style of presentation spanning many dimensions which determines the types of work environments it is appropriate for. Support of diverse awareness styles is a critical goal for an awareness technology which spans diverse users.
Information Sources: Describes the WebDAV server that comes with the software and discusses the task of building new information sources.
Meta Information: An important difference between notification servers based upon the CASS strategy and other servers is the availability of meta information that enables users to select the information to which they want to subscribe.
CASSandra Toolkit: A toolkit that helps with developing software which interacts with CASSIUS, and comes with a default user interface for enabling users to subscribe to information.
Terminology: Defines some of the terms used in this work.
Scenarios: Presents scenarios for how this software can make a difference in the workplace. This page focuses on scenarios that potential users are attempting to address.
Printable Flier: This is the flier presented to DARPA which focuses on monitoring of software architectures but also provides a good overview of our approach.
Download: Download all of the software of the CASSIUS project including the server, toolkit and sample awareness tools and WebDAV server.
Documentation: Contains all information needed to install the server and build clients and toolkits that work with the server.

Publications

Kantor, M. Creating an Infrastructure for Ubiquitous Awareness, Technical Report UCI-ICS-01-16, Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, Month 2001.

Kantor, M., Redmiles, D. Creating an Infrastructure for Ubiquitous Awareness, Eight IFIP TC 13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT 2001Tokyo, Japan), July 2001, pp. 431-438.

de Souza, C.R.B., Basaveswara, S.D., and Redmiles, D.F. Using Event Notification Servers to Support Application Awareness, to appear in the Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (Cambridge, MA), November 2002.