Universal Conference Information Server for Distributed Synchronous Collaboration

9313857 Abdel-Wahab传统上，互联网主要用于异步协作，主要使用电子邮件、远程登录和文件传输。最近，我们看到计算机会议作为一种新的Internet应用程序的出现，它允许地理位置不同的用户作为一个团队在共同的项目上进行同步协作。以前需要几天才能完成的过程，需要在用户之间来回发送文档，现在可以在几分钟内完成，这提高了工作效率，有助于更快地做出决策。目前还没有标准的协议和机制允许计算机会议注册和宣传自己。因此，用户必须依靠个人通信和其他间接方法来查找和定位正在进行的会议，以便他们可以加入和参与。为了解决这一问题，本项目将设计并实现一个名为通用会议信息服务器（UCIS）的系统。统一信息系统的实施将促进这一领域的进一步研究，并可作为为基于计算机的会议确定并最终采用标准因特网协议的基础。该系统有三个主要组成部分：播音员、服务器和查询器。播音员将会议信息发送到服务器，而查询者检索存储在服务器上的会议信息。像大多数互联网服务一样，UCIS将以TCP和UDP两种形式提供服务。我们将定义所有三个组件使用的必要协议，并提供可被计算机会议系统构建者用作模型的示例实现。该系统被设计为可伸缩的，以处理这种同步协作形式的预期增长，并为Internet上任何位置的任意数量的用户提供可靠、准确和快速的访问。＊＊＊

9313857 Abdel-Wahab Traditionally the Internet has been used for asynchronous collaboration mostly using email, remote login and file transfer. Recently we have seen the emergence of computer conferencing as a new Internet application to allow synchronous collaboration among geographically diverse users working together as a team on common projects. A process that once would have taken days, with documents being sent back and forth between users, now can be completed in a few minutes which increases the productivity and helps in making decisions quicker. At this time there is no standard protocol and mechanism that allows computer conferences to register and advertise about themselves. Therefore users have to depend on personal communications and other indirect methods to find out and locate ongoing conferences so that they can join and participate. In this project a system called Universal Conference Information Server (UCIS) will be designed and implemented to solve this problem. This implementation of UCIS will stimulate further research in this area and can be used as a basis for defining and ultimately the adoption of a standard Internet protocol for computer-based conferencing. The system has three major components: Announcers, Servers, and Queriers. Announcers send conference information to Servers, while Queriers retrieve conference information stored at the Servers. Like most Internet service, UCIS will offer its services in both TCP and UDP forms. We will define the necessary protocols used by all three components and provide sample implementation which can be used as a model by computer conference system builders. The system is designed to be scalable to handle the expected growth in this form of synchronous collaboration and to provide reliable, accurate, and fast access to any number of users anywhere in the Internet. ***