Human collaboration tools for net-centric operations

Abstract

Summary form only given. Recent research and development by Ball Aerospace's Collaborative Technologies and Solution Group (CTSG) have underscored the need of a new genre of collaboration and communication technology. Ball is developing a new desktop collaboration tool called net-centric operations or simply "NetOps." NetOps is a cross-platform, companion-tool to KnowledgeKinetics, which aims to fill a void found in current COTS human collaboration tools. NetOps is a desktop-based (thick client) presence and instant messenger application providing an extendable set of tools and capabilities, which promote team collaboration and coordination on a large scale. NetOps communicates presence and chat information using the Jabber XML-based XMPP standard, while Web-services handle tool or organizational information to make communications through firewalls a non-issue. In addition, NetOps provides the capability of domain specific inter/intra crew tasking, communications, alerting, and presence management in a 24/7 operating environment. Ball's integrated virtual meeting application (VMA) tool allows users to schedule virtual meetings, conduct video teleconferences, and execute instant meetings. Both NetOps and VMA provide open plug-in architectures and APIs other developers may use to extend the base capabilities or add domain specific tools. At CTS 2005, we provide an interactive demonstration of the current state of the NetOps technologies and tools. Demonstration attendees are able to connect to a NetOps server wirelessly and/or via Ethernet, automatically download the NetOps client, and participate in the demo. An interactive demonstration of VMA, including video teleconferencing using wavelet compression over HTTP/S, is also presented