A Declarative Approach for Specifying User-Centric Communication

The rapidly growing, reliable network infrastructure available today is enabling several classes of communication and collaborative applications. Already, a wide range of communication applications, tools and services (e.g., IP telephony, instant messaging, digital video conferencing, and multimedia collaboration), and many domain- or industry-specific communication applications (e.g., telemedicine, disaster management, and defense) have been developed and deployed. However, these communication applications have been conceived, designed and developed vertically and separately with little or no connection to each other. In addition, there has been little or no attention paid to how the end-user specifies his/her communication needs when using these applications. We propose a new paradigm to define user-centric communications, which is based on a simple and declarative Communication Modeling Language (CML) and a network abstraction middleware, which we call Communication Virtual Machine (CVM). To clarify this paradigm we draw a parallelism to the transformation that has taken place in the data management domain over the last two decades. In this paper we focus on CML and present two concrete and equivalent variants, an XML-based and a graphical. We argue that the proposed CML can facilitate the specification of a wide range of user-centric communication scenarios in several domains.