A Three-Tier View-Based Methodology for Adapting Human-Agent Collaboration Systems

With recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures, there are increasing demands for mobile users to connect to existing collaboration systems. This requires extending supports from web browsers on personal computers to SMS, WAP and PDAs. However, in general, the capabilities and bandwidth of these mobile devices are significantly inferior to desktop computers over wired connections, which have been assumed by most collaboration systems. Instead of redesigning or adapting collaboration systems in an ad-hoc manner for different platforms in a connected society, we propose a methodology of such adaptation based on three tiers of views: user interface views, data views and process views. These views provide customization and help balance security and trust. User interface views provide alternative presentations of inputs and outputs. Data views summarize data over limited bandwidth and display them in different forms. Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach of applying process views to mobile collaboration process adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedures. The process view also serves as the centric mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. This methodology also discusses ways to support external mobile users who have no agent support, customizable degree of agent delegation and the employment of constraint technology for negotiation. We demonstrate the feasibility of our methodology by extending a web-based meeting scheduler into a distributed mobile one. Keyword: mobile collaboration, constraints, process views, three-tier architecture, meeting scheduler, negotiation