Faunus: a flexible middleware for specifying and managing multimodal, multiparty collaborations

Faunus addresses the challenge of specifying and managing complex collaboration sessions. Many entities from various administrative domains orchestrate such sessions. Faunus decouples the entities that specify the session from entities that activate and manage them. It restricts the operations to specific agents using capabilities. It unifies the specification and management operations through its naming system. Each Faunus name is persistent and globally unique. A collection of attributes are attached to each name. Together, they represent a collection of services that form a collaboration session. Anyone can create a name; the creator has full read and write privileges that can be delegated to others. With the proper capability, anyone can modify session attributes between an active and inactive state. Though the system is designed for Internet scale deployments, the security model for providing and revoking capabilities currently assumes an Intranet style deployment. We have incorporated Faunus into a DisplayCast system that originally used Zeroconf. We are incorporating Faunus into another project that will fully exercise the power of Faunus.