Introduction
Figure 1: Terminology of computer conferencing
Figure 1 gives a pictorial introduction to the main terminology
in computer conferencing.
Notation
For terminology, the various terms in different systems are given with
the system name in parenthesis.
By (ISO) is meant the proposed terminology in the latest version of
the ISO/CCITT working paper to become a forthcoming standard for computer
conferencing. The standard is not ready, so the term may change [8].
By (KOM family) is meant all the systems in the KOM family of conference
systems: COM, PortaCOM [16] and SuperKOM [14], [15].
By (EIES) is meant both EIES 1 and EIES 2 [18], [20].
Items
Inter-personal message
Function: Items of text sent to individually named
recipients.
Terms: Message (EIES, Caucus), Mail message(COSY), Inter-personal message
(X.400), Letter (KOM family).
Contribution
Function: Items of text sent to groups of recipients.
In advanced systems, items can contain drawings and voice. Such items
are called multi-media items.
Terms: Contribution (ISO), Article (Usenet News), Comment (EIES), Entry
(KOM family), Message(Cosy), Item(Caucus).
Notifications
Function: Various kinds of notifications to a
user when things of importance to that user happens, such as the re-sending
of his/her contributions, their removal by the moderator, the addition
of the user to a new conference etc.
Term: Notification.
Implementation: The type of notifications available vary between systems.
Some systems present notification as news items, other only store them
so that the user can request them when they are needed.
Conference types
Conference
Function: A set of participants and a set of
contributions which they all can read and usually also write.
Terms: Bulletin Board, Group activity (ISO), Conference (EIES, SuperKOM,
Cosy, Caucus), Meeting (PortaCOM), Newsgroup (Usenet News).
Open conference
Function: A conference which any participant
can make himself a member of.
Terms: Open (ISO, KOM family, Cosy, Caucus), Public (EIES).
Closed conference
Function: A conference to which only the owner
or moderator can add members.
Terms: Closed (ISO, KOM family, Cosy), Private (EIES, Caucus).
Restricted conference
Function: A conference to which some, but not
all, participants can make themselves a member.
Terms: Restricted (PortaCOM), Open for (SuperKOM).
Implementation: The group of people who are allowed to add themselves
as member to a restricted conference are often defined as the set of members
in another conference.
Protected conference
Function: A conference on which no information,
not even its name, is available to non-members.
Terms: Protected (KOM family), Hidden (EIES), Confidential (Cosy), Unlisted
(Cosy, Caucus).
Write-protected conference
Function: A conference in which only some of
the members can add entries to it.
Terms: Write-protected (KOM family), Read-only(Cosy, Caucus).
Implementation: Note that the right which is controlled is not the permission
to write, but the permission to add contributions. The person who has
these rights (usually the moderator of the conference) can thus add not
only his own, but also entries written by other participants.
In Caucus, every conference can have full and readonly members, so a
write-protected conference in Caucus would simply be an ordinary conference
which has some readonly members.
In KOM, there is for every write-protected conference a superconference.
If a member who is not allowed to write into the conference tries to add
an entry, the entry is instead sent to the superconference.
In SuperKOM (version 2.3) write-protection only applies to original
contributions, not to replies on them. A member can however set his membership
so that he only sees the original contributions.
Subconferences
Function: Conferences within conferences.
Terms: Subconference (ISO, SuperKOM) Topic (Cosy).
Implementations: In Cosy, everyone who becomes a member of a conference
automatically becomes a member of all topics within that conference. In
SuperKOM, the subconference is announced in its superconference, and for
open subconferences, members of the superconference can add themselves
as members if they so wish. In SuperKOM, sub- and subsub-conferences can
be nested to any depth.
Operations on conferences
Suspension
Function: The temporary cancelling of all rights
to add entries to a conference or a conversation, usually controlled by
the moderator.
Terms: Suspension (ISO), Closed/open (EIES), Frozen(Caucus).
Suspension in Caucus applies to conversations, not to conferences.
Announcement
Function: Aids for the creator of new conferences
to announce their existence and for participants to be informed when new
conferences are created.
Terms: Announcement.
Implementations: In SuperKOM, announcement of new conferences are handled
in a similar manner to other contributions, and can be sent to any conference.
Usually, such announcement messages are sent to special announcement conferences.
By becoming a member of an announcement conference, a user will be told
of new conferences announced in it, just as viewing ordinary new contributions
in a conference, but in a special format suitable for choosing whether
or not to join the new conference.
In many other systems, there is a special facility for telling users
of new conferences, for example when they log into the system.
Conference directory
Function: Aids for finding which conferences
exist.
Terms: Directory (SuperKOM, EIES), show command (Cosy), List conferences
(Caucus).
Implementations: There is usually commands to list all conferences.
The listing can in some systems be restricted to certain types of conferences
(e.g. only open conferences), to only direct or indirect subconferences
to a certain superconference (SuperKOM) or to only conferences which have
been active (received new contributions) recently (COM, PortaCOM).
There is also often a facility to search the directory of conferences
based on words in the name of the conferences and/or additional keywords
on them.
User directory
Function: To find and read information about other users.
Terms: Directory (SuperKOM, ISO, EIES), Presentation (KOM family) Profile
(Caucus).
Item directory
Function: Aids for finding contributions and
other text items.
Terms: Directory (SuperKOM), index (EIES, ISO, Caucus).
The item directory is a way of assigning keywords to contributions and
other text items and for finding them from their keywords, subjects and/or
text contents via text retrieval commands.
Such directories can be closed within a certain group, or localized
to only a certain conference or group of conferences.
Create conference operation
Function: The creation of a new conference.
Terms: Create conference (KOM family), Mod new (Cosy), Start (Caucus).
Implementation: In some systems, all participants can create new conferences,
in some systems only certain privileged participants. In some systems,
the owner of an installation of the system can choose whether all or only
some participants can create new conferences. In a system with subconferences,
the rights to create new conferences can vary with the level of the conference
in the hierarchy.
Membership application
Function: To apply for membership in a conference.
Terms: Become member of (KOM family), subscribe (Grace), join (Cosy).
Implementation: For some conferences, called open or public conferences,
some or all participants can make themselves members of the conference.
Some systems have a special facility for applying for membership to
a closed conference, these applications are then either granted or rejected
by the owner or moderator of the conference.
Withdraw
Function: To withdraw from a conference.
Terms: Withdraw (KOM family, Cosy), Resign (Caucus).
Implementation: In some systems, all members can always withdraw from
conferences. In other systems, withdrawal is controlled by the moderator.
In some systems, a member who has withdrawn, is allowed at a later time
to make himself a member of the conference again.
Conference archive
Function: The facility to retrieve already seen
contributions.
This is one of the major differences between conference systems and distribution
list systems. Usually, new members of a conference can read contributions
written before they became members.
Terms: Conference archive, Review seen (KOM family), View all accepted
(EIES 2).
Membership lists
Function: The capability to find which are the
members of a conference, and sometimes also how much they have left unread
in the conference.
Implementation: This facility is available in most conference systems.
It is useful because a person who writes in a conference wants to know
who will read or have read his contributions.
Special procedures
Moderator
Function: A role with special privileges for
a certain conference. Typical such privileges are to remove any entry
from the conference, to add and remove members, to suspend and close the
conference.
In pre-moderated conferences, the moderator must approve each
contribution before it is accepted and made available to the conference
members. In post-moderated conferences, the moderator does not
approve items in advance, but can remove items after they have been sent
out. The advantage with pre-moderation is that unnecessary duplication
and non-pertinent items can be avoided in groups with very heavy load.
The disadvantage with pre-moderation is that it slows down the group interaction
very much. Typical delays between a contribution and replies to it are
six hours in post-moderated conferences compared to one wek in pre-moderated
conferences.
Terms: Owner, Moderator (ISO, Cosy, EIES), Organizer (SuperKOM, Caucus).
Implementation: The moderator role is in some systems split into several
roles, such as an owner (who controls membership), an editor (who can
remove contributions) etc.
Roles
Function: When special rules apply to a conference,
these rules will organize the members into groups with different capabilities.
Terms: Roles.
Office procedures
Function: Special rules applied to certain conferences.
A set of rules, written in some kind of programming language, controls
the actions in certain conferences.
Terms: Office procedures. The conference, which has special rules, may
sometimes not resemble any ordinary conference at all, and the term domain
is then preferred to the term conference.
Commitment
Function: Handling of information about tasks,
priorities, promised delivery dates, who has promised to do what.
Terms: Commitment.
Deferred operation
Function: The storage of operations to be performed
at a later time.
Term: Deferred delivery (X.400), deferred operation.
Implementation: There should be a possibility for users to find their
deferred but not yet executed operations, and to modify or delete them.
Joint editing
Function: Support for the joint editing of a
text by a geographically distributed set of users.
Term: Distributed authoring, joint editing.
Implementation: System with such support have a capability to hold a
master copy of the document, to stop two users from modifying the same
part of the document simultaneously, and to have discussions hanging on
pieces of the draft document.
Voting
Function: Support for sending out vote queries
and counting the replies.
Term: Voting, balloting, polling.
Implementation: Various algorithms for counting and presenting the result
of the vote are used.
Data base
Function: Data base facilities built into the
conference system.
Implementation: Contributions can be found by data base queries. Sometimes
information can be created by automatic combining of information in other
contributions.
Contributions
Anonymous/Pseudonymous contributions
Function: The possibility to write contributions
where the author's name is withheld from the readers of the contribution.
Terms: Anonymous, pseudonymous contributions. For pseudonymous contributions,
a pseudonym chosen by the user replaces the normal author name. EIES and
Caucus have such a facility for writing pseudonymous contributions.
Implementations: In most systems, it may be possible using privileged
commands to find out the real author of an anonymous or pseudonymous contribution.
In some systems, it is possible to write personal replies to the author
of anonymous or pseudonymous contribution without knowing the name of
the person behind the pseudonym.
Submit contribution
Function: Submitting contributions to a conference.
Implementation: This right is usually open to all members of the conference.
It can be restricted to only the moderator. In those cases, other members
can sometimes submit contributions, but they are not added to the conference
until they have been approved by the moderator.
Some systems also allow non-members to send contributions to all or
some conferences.
Multi-recipient submission
Function: Submitting the same contribution to
more than one conference, and possibly also as personal mail.
Implementation: In the KOM family, any participant can send a contribution
to several conferences and/or personal recipients. Group replies are normally
sent to the same set of conferences and personal recipients who received
the replied-to entry.
In EIES 2, a contribution always belongs primarily to one conference.
But a contribution or a set of contributions in one conference can be
submitted as attachments to contributions in other conferences.
Group reply
Function: The ability to send a reply to all
recipients of the replied-to item.
Terms: Comment (KOM family, Cosy), Add response (Caucus) Reply all, Group
reply.
Implementation: There is often a way to let some special recipients
see a particular item without forcing them to see all replies to it.
Obsoletes
Function: The ability to change already submitted
contributions.
Terms: Obsoletes (X.400), change entry (SuperKOM), update (Cosy), change
item and change response (Caucus).
Implementation: In SuperKOM, recipients of an obsoleted contribution
will be shown that this contribution obsoletes a previous contribution,
and can with a special command see the text before the change.
Delete contribution
Function: The ability to remove or delete contributions.
Terms: Remove, delete, erase, withdraw.
Implementation: In some systems (KOM, PortaCOM), removed items will
not be visible even to those who have already received them. In other
systems (SuperKOM) it is not possible to remove items from the mailboxes
of the recipients, but they can be marked as deleted, which means that
they are not shown as new.
Body types
Function: The ability to send contributions containing
other data than ordinary text. Examples are word processing documents,
spreadsheets, executable object programs, graphics etc.
A special case is where a contribution contains a program in a top-level
language, which is executed when the recipient reads it. This facility
is called activity in EIES 2 and delayed command in COM.
Terms: Attachment (EIES 2), Body part types (X.400).
Implementation: In EIES 2, such data can be put into attachments to
ordinary contributions. In X.400, each message can consist of several
body parts, each of a particular type.
Usually, there are safeguards to protect the recipient from being mistreated
by such executable entries.
Expiration times
Function: Expiration times of various kinds on
contributions.
Terms: Expiration time, validity time.
Implementation: There are two kinds of expiration time. One is the time
before which a contribution may not be deleted, the other is a time after
which a contribution should not any more be available.
PortaCOM has such a facility. In SuperKOM, entries can be marked as
archived to protect against purging.
Security
Function: Use of special cryptographic security
facilities to stop misuses like reading of items by non-authorized users,
falsifying items, ensuring that the author of an entry is the one given
etc.
Terms: Encryption, electronic signature etc.
Implementation: The various facilities are described in great detail
in the X.400 messaging standard (not in the 1984 version of it).
Reading
News control
Function: The facility to find only unseen contributions.
Terms: News control, conference marker, view full text (EIES 2), read
next unseen/entry/comment/letter (KOM family), Carriage Return key only
(KOM family, Cosy), Show new (Caucus).
Implementation: There are two two main methods. One is via a conference
marker, which for each conference marks how far in the list of contributions
the user has read. This method (used in EIES 1, Cosy, PortaCOM) has the
restriction that it will only work if users read contributions in sequential
order. The other method is by information for each participant of which
contributions that participant has read or not read. This method is used
in SuperKOM, EIES 2 and Lotus Notes.
A special problem is how to handle the case where a user is a member
of more than one conference, and an entry was sent to both conferences.
Those systems which allows participants to submit the same entry to more
than one conference, also usually have a facility so that such double
members will not be shown the same entry as new more than once.
Filters
Function: The storage of a series of conditions,
which are applied to new contributions to find those that satisfy certain
criteria.
Term: Filter.
Implementation: Filters can operate on the incoming contributions for
a particular participant, or on the whole stream of publicly available
contributions. Selected contributions can be sorted into folders in the
workspace of the user, or submitted to special conferences for receipt
of filtered contributions.
Management
Purging
Function: Purging of old contributions.
Terms: Garbage collection, cleaning, purging.
Implementation: Most conference systems have some facility to automatically
remove old contributions to save disk space. A good purging system should
not delete a contribution before the deletion of group replies on it.
Distributed operation
Distributed service agents
Function: Distributed functionality I: Several
conference system installations can be connected and run conferences in
parallel.
Terms: Distributed operation, parallel conferences. This functionality
is available in EIES 2, SuperKOM, Caucus and Lotus Notes.
Implementation: The implementations vary in the ease with which this
is handled. In older systems, like PortaCOM, concerted action by moderators
of both systems is needed to set up parallel conferences. In newer systems
like EIES 2 and SuperKOM, conferences will automatically be copied in
parallel to all hosts where there is at least one member of the conference.
Distributed user agents
Function: Distributed functionality II: Support
programs for conferencing in personal computers and workstations.
Terms: User agent, PC version.
Implementation: In some implementations, the PC version mainly handles
the user interface, but retrieves data when the user asks for it from
the central systems. This method (used for example in the MacCOM and EasyCOM
front-end programs for PortaCOM) often give long response times and delays
unless the connection to the main system is very fast.
Other implementations keep a complete one-user conferencing data base
on the PC/workstation, so that a user need only connect to the network
to upload and download news. The user can then use the conferencing system
off-line, and even read conference by conference and write new entries
off-line. Systems in this category are SuperKOM and Lotus News. The SuperKOM
user interface can either be used locally in the PC or in a unix server
on the network, while Lotus News always runs the user process in the PC
of the user.
The advantage with a full data base in the PC/workstation is very fast
response times for most commands and that you save the cost of keeping
a telephone line open during the whole session. The disadvantage is that
it becomes more difficult for a user who wants to access the system sometimes
from a PC at work, sometimes from a PC at home, sometimes from a third
PC on travel.
Inter-personal mail standard support
Function: The ability to co-work with electronic
mail.
Implementation: In most systems, this only means that you can send e-mail
messages from conference systems. In some systems (PortaCOM and SuperKOM)
it is also possible to receive incoming e-mail directly into conferences,
and to make external e-mail mailboxes into members of conferences.
Standardized connection to other conference systems
Function: Capability to co-work with other conference
system installations, so that parallel conferences can be run even though
the sites use different conferencing software. Note that this is more
than only the capability to interwork with other systems for the sending
and receipt of personal electronic mail.
Implementation: This requires a standard for the interchange of information
between the systems. No full such standard exists. However, some systems
(PortaCOM, SuperKOM and Caucus) can communicate using the Internet/Usenet
messaging standards.
Geographical/organizational restriction.
Function: A contribution can be sent to a conference,
but be distributed only to a subset of its members, e.g. only to members
within a certain country or a certain organization.
Terms: Geographical/Organizational restrictions on distribution.
Implementation: This facility is available in Usenet News. The existence
of this facility is controversial, since some people say that it would
be confusing and unwise to have such subsets of recipients. There are
however obvious advantage, such as posting a notice that you want to sell
a car only to recipients within your own geographical area.
Conversational support
Conversation scanning
Function: The capability to scan conversations
in various ways.
This function allows a user to find, from one contribution, the other
contributions which are related to it by being replies to each other.
Terms: Conversation, thread, tree.
Implementation: This capability is available in some conference systems,
for example those in the KOM family and Caucus.
In Caucus, a conversation is handled in many ways similarly to conferences
in other systems, users can thus see lists of conversations, find a conversation
from its title etc.
Membership in conversational branches
Function: The capability to move conversational
branches from one conference to another, and to add and remove recipients
from conversational branches. Users can also themselves withdraw from
reading further entries in conversations of less interest to them.
Implementation: This capability is available in SuperKOM. The Participate
conferencing system has some of this capability.
Special support for distance education
Exams
Function: Support for giving exams to students
in distance education.
Implementation: An exam facility typically will deliver the exam with
a limited time for the student to answer each question, and where the
student cannot take the same exam with the same questions more than once.
In this way, cheating can be controlled.
Teacher questions
Function: Teacher asking questions to students
in distance education.
Implementation: A typical implementation of this is where the teacher
posts a question, the replies from the students are collected, and the
students are not shown the replies from other students until they have
answered themselves, or until the teacher makes the replies available.
Referring to passages within contributions
Function: The ability to write replies directed
at certain words, phrases or paragraphs of a previous contribution.
This has many uses, one of them is in distance education, where it makes
it easier for the teacher to correct and comment on papers written by
the students.
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