Method for the establishment and maintenance of collaborative communication associations based on multiple contextual criteria

• US 7,487,158 B2
• Filed: 02/01/2005
• Issued: 02/03/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 02/01/2005
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Castro, Paul C., Misra, Archan
• Primary Examiner(s): Alam; Hosain T
• Assistant Examiner(s): Bromell; Alexandria Y
• Application Number:
  US11/048,671
• Publication Number:
  US 20060173936A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,463 Days
• Field of Search: 707/1, 707/5, 707/9, 707/10, 707/201, 709/217
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/1822 Conducting the conference, e.g. admission, detection, selection or grouping of participants, correlating users to one or more conference sessions, prioritising transmission
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/185 with management of multicast group membership

Abstract

A method for dynamically setting up collaborative associations between a group of users, computing resources, and/or communication devices, where the constituents of the collaborative association are chosen based on a variety of contextual criteria. The dynamic collaboration enabler component determines the explicit identities of the parties that should be a part of the collaboration. The group of individual entities involved in the collaboration can change dynamically during the lifetime of the collaboration, based on appropriate changes in the contextual data. Such contextual data refers to both state variables associated with the collaboration software or infrastructure itself, or to the state of entities external to the collaboration. The duration of the collaborative association is specified either explicitly or through a set of context related conditions. The dynamic context enabler can detect when the set of termination conditions is satisfied and then automatically remove the collaborative association.

Claims

1. A method for criteria-based establishment and/or termination of a collaborative session among a group of dynamically varying users, comprising steps of:

maintaining, for each of a plurality of users, a set of contextual attributes, said set including an availability attribute representing an availability of the user, a skill attribute representing a skill of the user, and a location attribute representing a geographic location of the associated user, said maintaining including repeatedly updating the values of the contextual attributes in accordance with updates in the contexts represented by the attributes;

receiving a user-entered request to establish a collaborative session, said request specifying a set of predicates in terms of specific values of contextual attributes from among said contextual attributes required for users to participate in the requested collaborative session, and a termination predicate specifying a collaborative session termination event;

querying said sets of contextual attributes to identify each set contextual attributes having current values that satisfy said set of predicates;

establishing and maintaining a collaborative session among the users having sets of contextual attributes identified by said querying as satisfying said user-entered request a group of dynamically varying users identified according to said explicit set of individual or device contextual predicates;

repeating said querying while maintaining said collaborative session and, in response to said querying identifying another of said sets of contextual attributes as satisfying said set of predicates, adding the user associated with said another set of contextual attributes to said collaborative session;

detecting an occurrence of the event identified by said termination predicate; and

in response to the detecting, terminating the collaborative event.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein said user input request includes an identifier explicitly identifying at least one said users, and wherein said querying includes identifying whether the user is a member of the collaborative session based on the value of the availability attribute of the user.