News Story

Collaboration Integration Workshop Underway

Marc Eisenstadt, Friday 11 Oct 2002

KMi is hosting a two day integration workshop aimed at creating next-generation collaboration tools. The workshop, on 10th and 11th October, 2002, brings together KMi’s team with partners at the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton, all engaged in “Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid” (CoAKTinG), an EPSRC project funded as part of the UK’s e- Science Initiative on Grid computing.

CoAKTinG will provide tools to assist scientific collaboration by integrating “intelligent meeting spaces” (understanding when key events happen at a meeting) with techniques for taking live video and audio streams from internet-hosted meetings and annotating them with semantic tags to assist later retrieval and analysis. To this mix, KMi is adding its BuddySpace enhanced presence management and instant messaging tools, and another of its pioneering approaches called Compendium which helps capture the information generated in a discussion in the form of a visual “group memory” available to all stakeholders. Even those who missed a key discussion will be able to re-live it afterwards: a BuddySpace alert will take them straight to the relevant Compendium diagram, provide schematic highlights of the pros and cons of the debate, and let them jump directly to an “instant replay” of the video and audio streams that were recorded at that point in the discussion!