Software architecture
Policies for collaborative work
- Problem: A major problem about collaborativeness is to support conventions and policies, in order to share the remote devices (because, for example, 10 learners cannot handle the same device at the same time, but when one learner pilots a device, others can watch his performance).
- Solution: Our goal was *NOT* to provide a limited given set of policy. This would have implied to necessary use one of the predefined policy, even if it does not suits your needs. Instead, we provide a representation of environmental facts on which a policy can be based, thus offering the possibility to build your own policy according to your needs.
- Concepts: In order to achieve this, we use a concept-based system representing all the context of the manipulation (who is connected, how much time a learner handle the device, how much he has waited, etc. ...) and we build rules on those facts in order to determined who's turn it is to handle the remote device. Our concepts are stored as an ontolgy in a OWL file. Here is the snapshot of our ontology:
You can also browse it in the OWL format there.
We recommand Protégé software from stanford university as ontolgoy editor. - Rule-based decisions: Then, we use SWRL (A W3C rule markup language using OWL and based on RuleML) in order to describe the policy. This means the OWL is common for all policies, and the SWRL file embeds the conventions for a given policy.
Examples of policy are:
- "Admin Only": Only users with admin role can handle the device, others can only watch the experiments.
[ Download the SWRL file. ] - "Student with minus operating time": if a student ask for being the operator, he is granted this role in place of the current manipulator only if he had less operating time than the current operator.
[ Download the SWRL file. ] - "Student first time": Learners are granted the hand only if it is the first time that they are requesting it.
[ Download the SWRL file. ] - You have created you own SWRL policy ? Please tell me so that I can insert it here !
- "Admin Only": Only users with admin role can handle the device, others can only watch the experiments.
Figure of the moderation unit for collaborative accesses
More likely to be introduced here after a paper about this subject will be published.