Dynamic online collaborative information sharing in semantic multicast

Semantic multicast defines a large scale shared interaction infrastructure which provides a seamless environment for collecting, indexing, and disseminating the information produced in collaborative sessions to the correct users in the right amount of detail using IP multicast as the underlying data communication mechanism. A semantic multicast graph is discovered and constructed to organize user requests into a hierarchy of group requests that represents an increasingly specialized range and quality of semantic topics as one goes down the hierarchy. It establishes a logical flow of collaboration stream between interest groups. A semantic multicast graph is mapped onto a hierarchy of cooperating network content agents that gather information streams and incrementally enrich, archive and filter the streams for the semantic coverage of specific interest groups in the graph. Through this mechanism, the semantic multicast framework amortizes processing on information streams by automatically moving common operations on information streams needed to satisfy multiple user requests to content agents providing the services.