Hello, everyone! Now, we are going to move our project "Blue Sky Distance Collaboration System" to Apache Incubator for future development. Its aim is to make people under the sky to communicate and share resources with each other more easily. When, the system is employed, users can communicated via audio/video(computer screen also included) and text at the same time. In other words, Multi-Object Mutlimedia capable makes the system more vivid and glamorous. Cosmic Resource Share & Management System is also included. It provides unique portal for users to share resources(such as multi-object multimedia courseware).
Project Overview and Proposal Draft is attached below. For this is our first candidate project to Apache Foundation. We are grateful for your ideas! Waiting for your advice! Best Regards! Ting Peng([EMAIL PROTECTED])
From Xi'an Jiaotong University & IBM Open Technology Joint Develop Center
====================================================================================================== BSDCS(Blue Sky Distance Collaboration System) Overview Purpose The Purpose of this document is to give you an overview of the Blue Sky Distance Collaboration System Project from the now application and the future extent's perspective. It will review some of the principles and motivations behind the project, major application components, and a brief explanation of the system's technical organization. The descriptions of functionality in this document are meant to give you a high level overview of the system. For more detailed information you can look over the Feature List and related documents. Introduction Blue Sky Distance Collaboration System (BSDCS) is a suite of distance collaboration applications built on open source. It includes three interrelated parts. Distance Collaboration System can synchronously live broadcast and share of presider scenes, and offer real-time interaction between presider and participants by means of text and audio/video stream. And these can be improved in Distance Learning, Video Conference and Remote Assistant areas. BSDCS also offers two media players (for Linux and Windows, separately) and a resource share & management platform to support users of difference institutions to share resources. And the platform can also be used to share and manage other resource. So we want to extend BSDCS to such a system that fully breakthroughs time and space limitation, offers personalized and vivid interaction, makes the resource update, share and manage easy. Video and audio is essential in collaboration. Therefore, the main part of the system is Video Conference system. So BSDCS puts forward Distance Collaboration System. It can synchronously live broadcast and share of real-time scenes, and offer real-time interaction between presiders and participants by means of text and audio/video stream. In order to support users watching historical collaboration(such as courseware) and sharing resources from other institutions, BSDCS offers two media players (for Linux and Windows, separately) and an resource share & management platform. So BSDCS fully breakthroughs time and space limitation, changes the model from the "conference" to "collabortion", offers personalized service and vivid interaction, makes resource sharing easy. Major Application Components CWPlayer CWPlayer is a media player designed for users to watch historical collaboration(such as history video conference,courseware, etc). It can play not only the local resources, but also resources from remote server. Using this tool, office staffers can review conference even it's already ended, students can review course after-school, teachers can evaluate the course, and teaching management departments will be able to appraise courses. CWPlayer has multi-language versions, Simplified Chinese version and Traditional Chinese version, English version is scheduled to release later. It can be used under Windows 98/2000/XP. XPlayer XPlayer is a media player that supports multi-object multimedia application consists of local media or streaming media. It supports asf, rm, mov and other current mainstream media. In one word, it's a universal media player for GNU/Linux platform. The player has two components, stand-alone application and browser plug-in. Collaboration Recording Tool The history collaboration record consists of multiple scenes, which consists of participants' audio, video and screen data. With this tool, we can store the collaboration scenes as a courseware for later access and download. In this way, we can increase the efficiency of resource production and resolve the problem of updates synchronization of resources in distance collaboration, video conference and e-learning radically. Distance Collaboration System Based on GNU/Linux platform and open source technology, Distance Collaboration System uses IP Network as platform of transmission. It is a real time collaboration system. The system can synchronously live broadcast and share of presiders' scene, and offer real-time the interaction between presider and students by means of text and audio/video stream. So it also can be used in Video Conference, Remote Assistant and so on This system includes four parts: 1. Collaboration Service Center: Collaboration Service Center is the core of the whole System, and has also only one instance in the system. Its main function: responds the requests of login of presider Unit、Student Unit and MCU，sends command, controls group discussion, monitors the status message of Presider Unit and Student Unit. Besides, the center also can monitor the interactive message between presider and participants. 2. Multipoint Control Unit (MCU): There are two main functions of MCU, including interactive control over video/audio (achieved by MC) and video/audio data processing (achieved by MP). Multimedia Interactive Control is the main function of MC. MC receives the interactive control messages from the collaboration Service Center. With these messages, it can control the MP to process and transmit audio/video data. It monitors the topological structure of the links with other components and media stream processing and transmitting. It can set the MCUs's ID, subnet address, the Collaboration Service Center's IP, services ports and QoS parameters. In Collaboration System, MP can transmit data without processing. It's important to multicast data between subnets. With the feedback of MC and current network status, MP can support QoS control over audio/video data transmitting automatically. 3. Presider Unit: it can automatically identify whether the video device is connected. If the video device is connected, it will capture data from media device, and through real-time encoding, transmit to MCU in the same subnet. If there is a focused Participant unit, it will collect video/audio data of the focused student unit through MCU in the same subnet. Teacher unit can switch video data captured between camera and DV. Multimedia data transmission quality between Presider Unit and MCU is guaranteed by dynamic adaptive QoS control mechanism. During Presider's presentation, all operations on screen of the presider can be transmitted to every participant units in real-time. Presider unit captures and encodes screen, and then, transmits to MCU of the same subnet. Supporting with the cross-segment transmission of MCU distributed in each subnet, presider unit can transmit the screen information to participant units. Participant units decode it and then can view presider's screen information. However, participant units cannot operate the screen data. Presider unit can chat with all of student units through text interaction. All of participant units can see the interactive content. 4. Participant Unit: Participant unit can auto detect current equipment capability (for example it can detect the computer has video and audio device or not); when participant unit as a focus one, it can capture video and audio, then encode them in real time and transmit them to DTU which locate on presider unit network; participant unit can get presider's and focus participant's (if we have it) multimedia data from DTU which locate on itself network; The video/audio transmit quality between participant unit and DTU can ensure by dynamic adaptive Qos-controls. Focus participant can control bandwidth by QoS-control and MPEG4 compress parameters. If the system is not in interactive mode, participants can receive presider's video/audio. But when the system is in interactive mode, focus participant send his/her video and audio to DTU, non-focus participant can get the data and presider's video and audio data. Real-time decode screen information and locate play back. So each participant unit can reproduce the presider's operation. Resource Share & Management Platform The Resource Share & Management Platform use distributed storage; system inventory management strategy provides users with centralized retrieval services. The main meaning of the project is to build the platform for resource share & management on Linux, to provide users with transparent service of resource access, standardized resource description, unified interface and flexible security control mechanism, to make an expandable system, to support the dynamic accession of heterogeneous resource and to achieve rapid retrieval and positioning. Resource Management System consists of a number of resources sites. Each resource site in the system is a node of Wide Area Network and they store the physical resources. Resources can be visited and shared between the nodes, and the information description of resource is released through the regular register to center of service and management to register for release. And the distributed storage of resources is provided by the system, has effectively solved the problem of the storage of massive resources, while improving the overall system reliability. Through the support from the cluster of WASCE, it provides effectively supports for the needs of large-scale users visit. The center of service and management keep the latest resource index of the system，to realize the visits and the sharing of resources system in different resource sites. The system simultaneously manages and updates the resource index of different sites through maintaining an inventory system. To provide users with a powerful portal so as to the user retrieve the resource by the portal and to realize rapid inquiry in different resource site, on the purpose of sharing resources. When the user needs to access a resource, the catalog system provides a redirect function. ================================================================================== BSDCS Proposal(Blue Sky Distant Collaboration System,BSDCS) This proposal outlines the creation of a new, top-level Blue Sky Distant Collaboration Environment(BSDCS) within the Apache Software Foundation. Rationale The Blue Sky Distance Collaboration System Project is an open source cosmic distance collaboration project. By open source distance collaboration software we mean: Open Source Collaboration Player, Open Source Collaboration Recording Tool, Open Source Distance Collaboration System, Open Source Resources Sharing and Management Platform. And BSDCS can be extended in such parts as Video Conference, E-Learning, Remote Assistant and so on. The maintainers of BSDCS interested in joining the Apache Software Foundation for several reasons: * The legal umbrella. There are no outstanding legal issues with BSDCS, but the protection that Apache affords is valuable to the developers' peace of mind as their project grows. It is a benefit for both contributors and end-users to have a trusted entity involved with this aspect of the software. * Resolve current potential licensing issues with copyright license assignment and patent license grants that are addressed in the Apache 2.0license, but not in the MIT license. We had considered making this change independently earlier this year. * Increase public awareness of BSDCS and of the application of Apache licensing to business application level software. Lately the news is full of companies that are using a dual-license (GPL and commercial) model for enterprise software and BSDCS working with Apache opens an opportunity to strengthen what we feel is a much higher value way of doing things for both contributors and users. * Help the project attract contributors and service providers to attract clients who would feel more comfortable with the licensing coming through a well known and established organization like Apache. Criteria Community BSDCS has striven to foster a diverse community that is open to everyone. It is released under a non-reciprocal license to encourage the maximum possible adoption by all potential users and developers. The BSDCS community encourages suggestions and contributions from any potential user and developers. Meritocracy BSDCS was originally created by Qinghua Zheng and Jun Liu in September 2005. The BSDCS development is being done at XJTU-IBM Open Technology and Application Joint Develop Center, more than 20 developers are involved. The BSDCS community is a healthy meritocracy with plenty of developers. Features BSDCS is both a set of flexible, extensible applications such as "Distance Collaboration System", "Collaboration player", "Collaboration recording tool", "Resources Sharing and Management Platform " and so on, designed by engineers and educators with years of experience in the problem domain, as well as a framework that makes it possible to create new applications that exist with others. Initial Source BSDCS was developed by more than 20 developers at XJTU-IBM Open Technology and Application Joint Develop Center. Resources to be Created User, Dev, and Announce mailing lists. Copy current subversion code, and create a commits mailing list. Create Wiki. Avoiding the Warning Signs Orphaned products: The initial committers have a long-term interest in use and maintenance of the code. Inexperience with Open Source: The developers use a number of other open source projects within BSDCS, and are interested in how best to make open source work with their project, A Fascination with the Apache Brand: The developers of BSDCS have been quite successful on their own and could continue on that path with no problems at all. They are interested in joining the ASF in order to increase their contacts and visibility in the open source world. Committers * Qinghua Zheng * Jun Liu * Shan Jiang * Bo Dong * Yang Wu * Ting Peng * Wei Dong * Liyuan Dong * Weimei Lv * Jie Lin * Jingjing Gao * Fan Zhang * Dong Yang Proposed Apache Sponsor Incubator PMC Champions * <Add later>
