POSITION STATEMENT ON PRODUCING A GROUP COLLABORATION BASED APPLICATION TO OPERATE IN A WEAKLY CONNECTED ENVIRONMENT Keith Cheverst, Adrian Friday, Nigel Davies and Gordon S. Blair Distributed Multimedia Research Group, Department of Computing, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, U.K. telephone: +44 (0)524 65201 e-mail: nigel, gordon, kc, adrian@comp.lancs.ac.uk 1. Introduction The area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and the development of groupware applications has become very topical. However, to date little research has taken place on the issues raised regarding how one might design collaborative applications which are intended to operate over the weakly inter-connected network inherent in a mobile environment [Duchamp,92]. This position paper will describe our efforts in producing such an application. Section 2 of this paper presents an overview of our application. Section 3 then describes the application's user interface. Following this, Section 4 details the structure of the application. Finally, section 5 contains our concluding remarks. 2. Application Overview Field engineers working in the power distribution industry often have to respond to emergency situations. Currently, they are hampered by the lack of information which they have readily available whilst in the field. In order to receive the information which they require to perform a repair, the engineers either have to make a time consuming trip back to the office or try to get in contact with an often engaged central control centre. Our aim is to provide the means for field engineers to have at hand most of the information that they might require. This means providing the engineers with portable computers capable of storing large quantities of multimedia information such as network diagrams. This can now be achieved by using portable computers with CD-ROM drives attached. A further step to improving the efficiency of field engineers is to allow them to collaborate with one another. An example of this might be one field engineer being able to highlight an area of network diagram that is being displayed on a remote field engineers display while the two engineers discuss a problem. To offer field engineers such facilities we have implemented a collaborative multimedia application which should be of great benefit to field engineers in their day-to-day work [Davies,93]. The application has support for viewing geographical information (e.g. network diagrams) via a Geographical Information System (GIS), support for collaboration with other field engineers, and support for audio communications. Given the engineers' highly mobile working environment, the application needs to be able to respond to rapid and massive fluctuations in the underlying quality of service (QoS) provided by the underlying communications infrastructure [Katz,94]. 3. User Interface An example screen shot of the application's user interface is shown in figure 1. The conference manager or group co-ordinator component of the application is shown in the top left of the diagram. This component makes extensive use of icons [Gittins,86] to represent users and their applications. On the left hand side of the group co-ordinator component are icons representing the sub-applications or modules which are available to the user (the telephone represents audio communications and the globe GIS services) and on the right hand side are icons representing users that can participate in conferences. In the centre is a list of the current conference participants. Under each participantÕs icon is a column