Why Seek Ubiquitous Event-Filtration Control at the Multi-user Desktop?

Ideally, a multi-user desktop environment must cater adequately for dynamic and possibly unanticipated awareness needs of each participant [6]. Any strategy to fulfil these needs appropriately without overloading the participant with awareness-information presupposes the ability of the multi-user environment to be continuously informed of her awareness requirements. This provides the awareness engine [9, 17, 18] of the multi-user environment with the necessary guidelines to synchronise evolving awareness requirements with the presentation of awareness-information on individual desktops. Two ways in which this can be achieved are considered. One involves supplying the participant with a number of tailoring primitives which can be selected to enable specific event-filtrations. The other involves endowing the multi-user system with the ability (1) to track continuously the participant’s behaviour at the interface, such as her direct manipulations of interface elements, (2) to deduce her awareness needs and (3) to automatically configure or tune appropriately the awareness engine of the multi-user system. In this short paper, we contrast between these two approaches as follows. The first one involves explicit tailoring for awareness-information as the tailoring operations are distinguishable and separate from actual task operations. The second one involves ubiquitous tailoring for awarenessinformation since the tailoring operations are indistinguishable from and inherent in actual task operations.