Collaboration Instance Manager in UbiCollab

Abstract

The trend in the social networks has been to have large networks where each user is connected to hundreds of other users. There is a need to provide better support for groups with below ten participants. In UbiCollab this is addressed by a collaboration instance (CI), where a closer type of collaboration is present. A service to manage these CIs, the CI Manager (CIM), is investigated in this thesis. This is done by using scenarios from the area of city-wide collaborative learning (developed in cooperation with the FABULA project, www.fabula.idi.ntnu.no). Based on an analysis of the scenarios, CIM is designed and deployed as an Android service as part of the UbiCollab platform. The service is distributed and is built on XMPP, an open generic protocol that allows for real-time communication. In addition to provide support for other applications, the thesis has resulted in a tool to make the service directly available for end users. Focus groups were arranged during the design and implementation and were used in the evaluation process. The CIM has been evaluated by a set of external applications which make use of the API provided to realise a scenario. It is found that XMPP works well for real-time collaboration, and it is suggested to use something else for the asynchronous collaboration.