Requirements for Distributed Event-Based Awareness in P2P Groupware Systems

Abstract

One of the major premises of P2P systems is to enable fully decentralized collaborative functionalities for supporting work teams and P2P communities. Within collaborative systems, tracking and awareness are vital aspects for a successful collaboration. Despite the experience of using awareness in web-based applications, there has been little research in endowing P2P collaborative systems with generic, application-independent awareness mechanisms to fully support collaboration. In this work we present a distributed event-based awareness approach for P2P groupware systems. Unlike centralized approaches, several issues arise and need to be addressed for awareness in P2P groupware systems, due to their large-scale, dynamic and heterogenous nature. In our approach, the awareness of collaboration will be achieved by using primitive operations and services that are integrated into the P2P middleware. As a first step, we identify the major requirements for such an event-based awareness approach, including dynamics of events, genericity of events, lightweight mechanisms, automation via the use of rules, as well as event transformation, presentation, propagation and notification services in order to fully support timely awareness of collaboration activity. We then propose an abstract model for achieving these requirements and we discuss how this model can support awareness of collaboration in mobile teams.