Semantic multicast: Intelligently sharing collaborative sessions

We introduce the concept of semantic multicast to implement a large-scale s hared interaction infrastructure providing mechanisms for collecting, index ing, 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, ar chiving, and correlating collaborative sessions in user and context sensiti ve groupings. The semantic multicast service efficiently disseminates relev ant information to every user engaged in the collaborative session, making the aggregated streams of the collaborative session available to the correc t users at the right amount of detail. This contextual focus is accomplishe d by introducing proxy servers to gather, annotate, and filter the streams appropriate for specific interest groups. Users are subscribed to appropria te proxies, based on their profiles, and the collaborative session becomes a multi-level multicast of data from sources through proxies and to user in terest groups.