Context-Awareness in Collaboration Architecture: A Conceptual Model for an Enterprise

, , , , , , , , ,

Keywords: , , , , , , , , ,

Abhijit Sur

Abstract

Collaboration is essential within an organization to connect the right group of people to share knowledge and solve business problems. As enterprises strive to deploy a collaboration platform to capture and distribute ―collective user value‖, they now face another challenge – how to make this platform efficient and productive. This article discusses the role of context-awareness within a collaboration framework. It outlines how a collaboration platform that is aware of the context for collaboration will have capabilities of adapting the collaboration experience. Outlining attributes that define context for enterprise collaboration, we have built a conceptual delivery platform for collaboration services. We present four architecture principles that would enable a collaboration platform to be context-aware. A key consideration of this article is to include business processes within the realm of enterprise collaboration.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Abhijit Sur is a Principal Solution Architect with more than 15 years of experience at architecting, designing, and implementing large-scale projects within the telecommunications industry. He received his MS in Statistics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kanpur (India) and his MS in Telecommunications from the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA). He has led the development of ―rich presence‖ and digital media solutions, enabling communication service providers to deploy collaboration services for the consumer and enterprise markets.

REFERENCES

[1] Schilit B. et al: Context-Aware Computing Application, IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA), Santa Cruz, CA, USA, pp89-101 (1994).

[2] Sun J. & Sauvola, Jaakko: Towards a Conceptual Model for Context-Aware Adaptive Services, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies (PDCAT), pp90-94 (2003).

[3] Henricksen K., Indulska J., Rakotonirainy A.: Modeling Context Information in Pervasive Computing Systems, Pervasive Computing, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2414, pp79-117 (2002).

[4] Forrester: The Right Collaboration Architecture Drives Business Transformation (2009).

[5] Liesenberg P.: Architecting Collaborative Applications, ebizQ, 04/16/2009; refer to: www.ebizq.net/topics/enterprise_integration_architecture/ features/11186.html.

[6] Toninelli A., Montanari R., Corradi A.: Enabling Secure Service Discovery in Mobile Healthcare Enterprise Networks, IEEE Wireless Communications, pp24-32 (June 2009).

[7] The Business Case for Enterprise Mashups, IBM (2008).

[8] Anderson C.:The Long Tail, Wired Magazine (October 2004); refer to: www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html.

[9] Lankhorst M. et al: Enterprise Architecture at Work, Springer (2009).

[10] Wu X., Zhang L., Yu Y.: Exploring Social Annotations for the Semantic Beb, in WWW ’06: Proceedings of the 15th international Conference on the World Wide Web, New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, pp417-426 (2006).

[11] Johnston K.: Folksonomies, Collaborative Filtering, and e-Business: Is Enterprise 2.0 One Step Forward and Two Steps Back?, The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, Volume 5, Issue 4, pp411-418.

[12] Sur A., Schaffa F. et al: Extending the Service Bus for Successful and Sustainable IPTV Services, IEEE Communications Magazine, pp96-103 (August 2008).

Journal of Enterprise Architecture

Leave a Comment