Review pending -- do not distribute
Contextual Filter for the Ambient Enterprise
Adrien Joly
Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France
Centre de Villarceaux
Route de Villejust
91620 Nozay, France
adrien.joly@alcatel-lucent.com
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.4.3 [Information Systems Applications]: Communi-
cation Applications
General Terms
Knowledge Management, Ambient Awareness, Social Net-
working, Context-Awareness
Keywords
Enterprise knowledge, User activity, Context similarity, Web
2.0, Collective intelligence, Notifications, Tag clouds
1. PROMOTING COLLABORATION
On the so-called Web 2.0, numerous Social Networking
Sites (SNS) have known a tremendous success as they brought
new ways to communicate, interact, learn about people, and
share content with them. Besides improving informal so-
cial ties [3], transposing Awareness to the enterprise is very
promising for promoting collaboration. However, it can eas-
ily lead to information overload, which means productivity
loss. With our prototype, we propose a way to stimulate
enterprise internal communication while improving the rele-
vance of these interactions with the current working context
of their users.
2. DOCUMENTS AS CONTEXT CUES
Our prototype relies on the assumption that common con-
text between two people is an important factor to trigger
interaction [2] (e.g. sign of respect, conversation, or ex-
change). On Social Networking Sites like YouTube, Face-
book, or even blogs, discussions emerge from comments on
content [1]. This content becomes the common context of
this discussion. In the enterprise, projects and documents
are potential contexts materials for interaction. Indeed, a
person will respond more efficiently to a notification or re-
quest related to the project (or subject) he/she is currently
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Pierre Maret
Université de Lyon
Laboratoire Hubert Curien
UMR CNRS 5516
18 Rue du Professeur Benoît Lauras
42000 Saint-Etienne, France
pierre.maret@univ-st-etienne.fr
Figure 1: Modular overview of the prototype.
working on, because it will not imply as much cognitive load
as an interruption about a subject that is currently irrele-
vant.
3. OVERVIEW OF THE PROTOTYPE
The prototype is currently composed of four modules:
• Desktop activity sniffers that track documents being
currently accessed by the user on his terminal;
• a local context aggregator that gathers interaction logs
from the sniffers to synthetize the current user’s work
context as a tag cloud;
• a centralized contextual filter that evaluates the simi-
larity of current contextual clouds of every user to filter
notifications and propose collaboration when relevant;
• and a social notifier that displays these notifications
and collaboration proposals on the users’ terminal.
4. REFERENCES
[1] A. Joly, P. Maret, and J. Daigremont.
Context-awareness, the missing block of social
networking. International Journal of Computer Science
and Applications, 4(2), February 2009.
[2] Y. Vogiazou, M. Dzbor, J. Komzak, and M. Eisenstadt.
Buddy space: Large scale presence for communities at
work and play. In Proc. ECSCW03 Workshop, 2003.
[3] D. Vyas, M. van de Watering, A. Eliëns, and
G. van der Veer. Universal Access in Human-Computer
Interaction. Ambient Interaction, chapter Engineering
Social Awareness in Work Environments. 2007.
Review pending -- do not distribute

5. REQUIREMENTS
In this section, we describe the hardware, software and
network access required for performing the demonstration.

5.1 Hardware
This demonstration relies on three modern workstations
(i.e. 1+ GHz CPU, 1+ GB of RAM) and one server (similar
configuration) that have independent operating environment
(i.e. separate sessions and IP addresses) on MS Windows
XP. The workstations will communicate in loopback and to
the server through IP port 80. Three independent screens
are needed to see the current state of these three worksta-
tions at all times. However, because these workstations will
be controlled one at a time, it is possible to run them in
virtual machines, on the same physical computer sharing a
common keyboard and mouse, as long as each running ma-
chine has its own screen.

5.2 Software
The demonstration runs on MS Windows XP with Java
1.5. Each workstation must have Mozilla Firefox 2 (or 3) in-
stalled, and Administrative rights must be given so that ad-
ditional software can be installed. The demonstration con-
sists of the following software on each workstation:
• a Java-based local server, listening on port 80;
• a native daemon that hooks on Win32 APIs and con-
nects on local port 80;
• a Firefox extension that also connects on local port 80;
• and additional software such as Microsoft Office 2000+,
and other third-party software that will be provided for
simulating office-work activities on the workstations.
The central server software is a Java-based daemon listen-
ing on IP port 80, that must have direct access to the web
(through port 80, without proxy) and must be accessible
from the workstations (through port 80).

5.3 Network Access

The three workstations and the central server need to be
connected on a same IP network, and this network must of-
fer direct access to the web (i.e. through port 80, without
proxy). No extensive bandwidth is required but the persis-
tence and latency of the connectivity must be reliable.