Collaborative ANTS System

University of Murcia

The ANTS infrastructure defines a distributed architecture that enables development of new synchronous components on top of the Synergeia asynchronous workspaces and in addition this infrastructure could be integrated on top of any web educational environment.

Furthermore, the overall infrastructure also provides a coherent log service that permit advanced data analysis over the information produced by synchronous tools.

A key point of our infrastructure is the communication channel. This channel must serve a double task: propagation of state from synchronous applications and monitoring of events from external awareness applications. As a result of previous research works, we conclude that a high performance publish/subscribe notification system is the ideal option for supporting our communication channel.More concretely, we have previously worked with the DSTC Elvin notification system and we consider that this advanced middleware is a suitable solution for the Synergeia Synchronous infrastructure.

In general, this ITCOLE architecture is a simplification of a full ANTS system to support collaborative and cooperative work. For more information about the architecture click here:http://ants.etse.urv.es/

On the top of this architecture we have developed two sycnchronous tools called Maptool and InstantMessaging. Both tools have been developed using Java Applets.

The maptool consists in a whiteboard and a chat. This tool facilitate the creation of conceptual maps, diagrams and the textual communication with the rest of the users using the chat facilities. It provides facilities for including local images and manages another figures like arrows, lines, ovals, text and rectangles. Besides, all figures and images can be associated by using lines and arrows.

Inside Synergeia it is possible to save the information and to include previous session saved in others courses. To provide these operations inside the Maptool it has been neccesary to define an API to communicate BSCL system with the synchronous system.

The user interface of this applet is the following:

MapTool Interface

Following the basic design principles for a synchronous tool, this tool support these features:

Presence awareness showing a list of connected users.
Workspace awareness telepointer to show who is colaborating in the drawing area.
Late comming when a user come late in the session, he/she can retrieve the actual session information.
Internationalization different labels according to the user language.
The Instant Messaging is a tool who enables the direct communication between two or more users emulating some aspects in ICQ.

Interface to show how work the Instant Messages inside Synergeia

In the research to provide a way to retrieve and show information stored in log files in the server, some data analyzer tools have been developed, and they are still under construction. One of these tools is a web page which show bar graphics which reflects actions made in the different sessions by different users. And the other, Maptool tutor, is a tool which allow to show how the session has been constructed and which users were working in them in a time scale.

Maptool Log is a web tool that show graphics from log events about Maptool interactions. These events are stored in a database to facilitate and do faster the queries.

Maptool Log queries can be done using the following parameters: Tool, Course, and User, and results are displayed in bar graphics.

Maptool Log interface to show users interaction using Maptool applet

The maptool tutor is a tool whose aim is to show how a specific maptool session has been constructed. When any user retrieves the information from the Maptool Session (a JPEG file) or launch in the Maptool applet he/she can only see the result. However it could be interesting for a teacher or some users to know how this object has been built, who have been collaborating in the session and what they have done. In order to analyze this information it has been built a prototype similar to a player which shows the progress collaboration in the session following a time scale.

MaptoolTutor interface to show the progress in a session

This tools is an application which needs to install JDK1.2 or higher previously to run it.Click in this link to download it Prototype tutor It is in a zip format and inside contain a file called install.txt which explain the steps to be able to run this prototype. Next animations show the tools use:
 
Prototypes and Demonstrations
MapTool Instant Messaging MaptoolLog MaptoolTutor