Demonstrational Customization of a Shared Whiteboard to Support User-Defined Semantic Relationships among Objects

Abstract

As a promising approach to end-user computing, programming by demonstration (PBD) techniques have been explored by many researchers in single-user applications. This paper investigates how PBD techniques can be used to support end-user customization of groupware tools. In collaborative applications, complex semantic relationships can emerge unanticipatedly among objects (participants, data artifacts, tools, devices, etc.) such as the hierarchical organization of participants, consistency maintenance among different views of the same data, and awareness control. It is important that end users are empowered to customize the groupware application to model and enforce such relationships. We present an active rule based approach to modeling user-defined semantic relationships in collaborative applications and explore a demonstrational approach for end-user customization of collaboration tools to support the definition of those relationships. The presented work is based on our work on a shared whiteboard tool, CAB or Collaborative Active whiteBoard. Our approach is being generalized to support end user defined object relationships in shared workspaces.