A Decoupled Architecture for Action-Oriented Coordination and Awareness Management in CSCL/W Frameworks

This paper introduces AORTA, a software architecture that provides object- level coordination and shared workspace awareness support to synchronous and distributed collaborative applications. AORTA is motivated by the need to enhance current coordination and awareness capabilities of existing software component frameworks for the domains of CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) and CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work). AORTA is characterized by the use of actions as its key abstraction instead of low-level events, the support for mutual influence between coordination and awareness, the use of coordination and awareness policies for supporting complex and dynamic collaboration scenarios, and the use of software design patterns in order to decouple coordination and awareness from the development of other aspects of CSCL/W applications. The paper motivates, justifies, and describes the main functional features of AORTA as well as its proposed software architecture. The paper also introduces a prototype of AORTA that adds coordination and awareness support to an existing groupware framework called ANTS. Finally it describes a CSCL application developed on top of both AORTA and ANTS that has been used to validate some of the presented contributions: application development is decoupled from coordination/awareness aspects, application development is facilitated by the use of action-orientation, and application coordination/awareness behavior can be configured and changed without modifying the application itself.