Method and apparatus to support application and network awareness of collaborative applications using multi-attribute clustering

A computer readable storage device containing an executable program for clustering a multi-type vector space in accordance with a plurality of attributes including network attributes and application attributes, where the program performs steps comprising:

• obtaining the network attributes from a network having a plurality of nodes;
• obtaining the application attributes of an application;
• obtaining user's communication interest as represented by at least one of:
• a user request for a content update or a user subscription to a specific data item or to a set of proximal data sources;
• forming a plurality of feature vectors, one for each of the plurality of nodes, where each single one of the plurality of feature vectors is based on the user's communication interest, network attributes, and application attributes, such that each single one of the plurality of feature vectors comprises features extracted from a plurality of different types of sources;
• and
• clustering the plurality of nodes based on the plurality of feature vectors, wherein the clustering is performed by a nested method in which one or more of said plurality of nodes are initially clustered based on a sub-set of the plurality of attributes and then re-clustered by iteratively considering additional ones of the plurality of attributes.