Building Event-Based Services for Awareness in P2P Groupware Systems

Monitoring and awareness are essential in collaborative work environments, in order to support team members´ interaction and coordination processes. There has been much work in implementing awareness in web-based applications, but less so for P2P collaborative systems. P2P systems have the potential to foster more group interaction than server-based approaches, as group members can interact directly with each other and can share their knowledge, skills and resources in order to provide mutual support in the accomplishment of group tasks. Several challenges arise due to the large-scale, dynamic and heterogenous nature of P2P collaborative systems. In this paper we discuss the provision of event-based awareness services in P2P groupware systems. We first review the major requirements for such awareness functionality, and propose a structured P2P network model for meeting these requirements. We then identify a set of low level awareness services and show how these can interoperate over the P2P network in order to provide awareness as part of the P2P middleware infrastructure. Finally, we envision the use of service composition to provide more complex awareness services and we discuss the implementation of a super peer network on a Cloud platform and the provision of reliable awareness services from the Cloud.