Supporting groupware communication with topology-enhanced content-based network

Content-based communication is a novel communication paradigm that enables users to communicate with others based on message's content, instead of message's address. Groupware is a kind of software that supports coordination between individual users. An important feature of groupware is that the communication between the specified users is at a high frequency, which is determined by the applied coordination mechanism. Efficient communication in a groupware can support effective coordination between the users. This paper presents a topology-enhanced content-based network, which combines content-based communication with the topology between groupware users, to support content-based communication in groupware. We give a predicate-based method to define cooperation topology, which can effectively describe the topology between groupware users. We also propose a multi-level index structure to support efficient matching of cooperation topology in the forwarding mechanism of the proposed network. We implement the basic feature of our network and evaluate the prototype in a motivating scenario consisting of several coordination tasks. The results show that our method improves the message forwarding efficiency of 1 to 2 magnitude orders.