Dynamic Awareness for Shared Workspaces

Being aware of others' activities plays a vital role in the success of online collaboration. As a result, many groupware systems nowadays provide information about collaboration activities in various forms. However, all of them tend to overburden the user with large amounts of unnecessary information. This happens because most of the time users are only interested in certain pieces of information for limited duration, while presently there exist no efficient mechanism for automatically following a user's focus and adjusting the information flow directed at him. In this book the author presents as a practical solution to this problem the dynamic awareness system (DAS), which extends the functionality of the BSCW shared workspace system. A key element of the DAS is its rule-based inference mechanism for adjusting the notification intensity, thus reducing the overall information overload. This indirectly allows users to both keep better track of relevant events and manage the shared data more efficiently. The effectiveness of the DAS was tested under real-life circumstances and the evaluation results are also described in this book.