Focused Effort Title: Collaborative Training Portals: Robust Event And Shared Document Collaboration Service Organization: Florida State University Thematic Area(s): HPC Training and DoD User Productivity Lead: Geoffrey Fox/David Bernholdt Email Address: gcf@cs.fsu.edu/bernhold@npac.syr.edu Telephone: 315 443 3857 Fax: 315 443 1973 Statement of Work: We explained in an accompanying focused effort (Collaborative Science Portals) a general approach to portals that is emerging from a combination of academic and commercial activities. Although there is large industry effort to build portals for Enterprise Information, the World Wide Web and Electronic Commerce, we use these ideas and technologies in the areas of training and computing which are not addressed by the major commercial activities. Each of these areas has particular objects and services of special relevance. We have also studied the implications of the rapid pace of the development of information technology driven by the Internet. Our plan is to have a clear overall vision, which we hope that our understanding of trends will enable to "last" for around 2-3 years. In the case of portals, this vision can be found in http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/documents/pajavaapril00/, http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/portalresearch/ and http://www.computingportals.org/. This vision is developed as part of our national collaborations and experience with the ongoing work at ERDC. We then will build modular systems from components, which hopefully can be developed by a distributed team of national collaborators. Each of these component capabilities should typically not be a large project (like say the recent NPAC Tango2 project that took some 18 months) but rather is designed to be at most 6-12 months. In this spirit, we consider focused efforts as designed around particular components that fit in the longer-term portal vision. We anticipate a continuing technology watch activity that will allow us to adjust detailed strategies on Internet time. In this focused effort, the goal is to build two portal capabilities of relevance to education and training. The result of this will be a system that can be used in teaching the same type of material used today but in much more robust environment that supports both asynchronous and synchronous learning. We intend to test the new capability in "collaborative tutorials" offered at ERDC -- initially using tutorials offered by FSU as part of core technology effort. We note that we cannot realistically "quickly replace" systems like TangoInteractive, which have a rich set of capabilities developed over many years. Rather we focus on the most important aspects of a Tango session and address these. We think that the two most important aspects of any collaborative training session are the Audio-Video conferencing (discussed separately) and shared curricula (documents). We anticipate using existing TangoInteractive or other systems to support shared chat rooms, instant messenger and white boards. The heart of the new portal architecture is a robust queued event system that replaces the server in the TangoInteractive approach. This concept is used to integrate asynchronous and synchronous collaboration and to support automatic system archiving. We will in first 6 months of this FE develop such a prototype system, which will federate events between the "personal servers" of the new portal architecture. Eventually this event service will support "all types of objects" (audio-video messages, chat rooms, hand-held prompts, chat-rooms, user customization, server side notification etc.). In this FE, we will aim at two important event capabilities. Firstly the events needed to support the separate "Hand-Held HPC access FE" and then the harder case of events needed to support both shared pages and tele-pointers for distance learning. This will re-use some of the ideas and perhaps code developed for the "JavaScript Shared Browser" in TangoInteractive. However rather the fragile JavaScript system implemented in TangoInteractive, we will minimize the browser code and place all the logic on the robust high performance personal server. This will of course make it possible to experiment with hand-held devices driven by the same personal server. This will allow the type of collaborative session developed this year as part of "MicroTango FE" but with the new portal architecture. Thus the structure of this FE is to develop a basic federated event service; test it in simple cases such as hand-held devices and then implement the richer shared document model. The latter should allow us a robust distance learning environment, which we will test with Jackson State and ERDC Training. Deliverables o 6 Months: Prototype Event Service o 8 Months: Stand alone Personal Server Based "JavaScript Shared Browser" o 8 months: Test of Event service linking hand-held devices o 10 months: Test of Event service linking shared browsers o 12 months: Use of system in distance learning o Presentations for PET Midyear and Annual Reviews o Inputs to PET Annual Report o Written progress reports in June and December 2000 o Final Technical Report in March 2001 Required Resources: $38,590 Item Base Fringe Overhead Total Geoffrey Fox 7,500 1,380 4,129 13,009 Graduate Student 16,000 96 7,485 23,581 Tuition 2,000 - - 2,000 TOTAL 38,590