Session Data Types: An Abstraction Layer for Shared-Experience Communications in Converged Applications

The shift to an all-IP telecommunications core holds the promise of rapid creation of a broad variety of collaborative interactive nulti-media multi-person applications, which take advantage of network-hosted communication services. An important category of such services is shared-experience communication services. By this we mean services that enable a person to be in a live interaction with other people (e.g., in a phone call, in IM, in a peer-to-peer video session), or with network components (e.g., with an audio menu-driven system, watching TV or a YouTube video), or both (e.g., two people in different places talking on the phone with simultaneous shared viewing and controlling of a YouTube video, etc.). With currently available technology, the creation of such blended services, and their incorporation of them into broader applications, typically requires familiarity with a plethora of standards and protocols at various levels of abstraction, including things like SIP (and possibly IMS), Parlay/ParlayX, PacketTV or analogous, XMPP, etc. The goal of the research reported here is to develop a novel approach for allowing web-level application programmers to incorporate shared-experience communication services into their applications, while insulating them from the heterogeneity and intricacy of the telecommunications standards and protocols.