Semantic multicast: intelligently sharing collaborative sessions

We introduce the concept of semantic multicast to implement a large-scale shared interaction infrastructure providing mechanisms for collecting, indexing, and disseminating the information produced in collaborative sessions. This infrastructure captures the interactions between users (as video, text, audio and other data streams) and promotes a philosophy of filtering, archiving, and correlating collaborative sessions in user and context sensitive groupings. The semantic multicast service efficiently disseminates relevant information to every user engaged in the collaborative session, making the aggregated streams of the collaborative session available to the correct users at the right amount of detail. This contextual focus is accomplished by introducing proxy servers to gather, annotate, and filter the streams appropriate for specific interest groups. Users are subscribed to appropriate proxies, based on their profiles, and the collaborative session becomes a multi-level multicast of data from sources through proxies and to user interest groups.