| Groups, Group Cognition and Groupware | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1-16 | |
| Gerry Stahl | |||
| More than we realize it, knowledge is often constructed through interactions among people in small groups. The Internet, by allowing people to communicate globally in limitless combinations, has opened enormous opportunities for the creation of knowledge and understanding. A major barrier today is the poverty of adequate groupware. To design more powerful software that can facilitate the building of collaborative knowledge, we need to better understand the nature of group cognition -- the processes whereby ideas are developed by small groups. We need to analyze interaction at both the individual and the group unit of analysis in order to understand the variety of processes that groupware should be supporting. This paper will look closely at an empirical example of knowledge being constructed by a small group and suggest implications for groupware design. | |||
| A Framework for Prototyping Collaborative Virtual Environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 17-32 | |
| Clinton Jeffery; Akshay Dabholkar; Kosta Tachtevrenidis; Yosep Kim | |||
| Unicron is a platform for rapidly developing virtual environments that
combine two popular forms of collaboration: a 3D collaborative virtual
environment fostering meetings, appointments, whiteboard sessions and lectures,
along with a 2D development environment including collaborative software
design, text editing, and debugging tools. This paper presents novel aspects of
the Unicron design and implementation. Keywords: Collaborative virtual environments | |||
| Adaptive Distribution Support for Co-authored Documents on the Web | | BIBA | Full-Text | 33-48 | |
| Sonia Mendoza; Dominique Decouchant; Alberto L. Morán; Ana María Martínez Enríquez; Jesús Favela | |||
| In order to facilitate and improve collaboration among co-authors, working in the Web environment, documents must be made seamlessly available to them. Web documents may contain multimedia resources, whose management raises important issues due to the constraints and limits imposed by Web technology. This paper proposes an adaptive support for distributing shared Web documents and multimedia resources across authoring group sites. Our goal is to provide an efficient use of costly Web resources. Distribution is based on the current arrangement of the participating sites, the roles granted to the co-authors and the site capabilities. We formalize key concepts to ensure that system's properties are fulfilled under the specified conditions and to characterize distribution at a given moment. The proposed support has been integrated into the PIÑAS platform, which allows an authoring group to collaboratively and consistently produce shared Web documents. | |||
| Agilo: A Highly Flexible Groupware Framework | | BIBA | Full-Text | 49-56 | |
| Axel Guicking; Peter Tandler; Paris Avgeriou | |||
| Today there exist many frameworks for the development of synchronous groupware applications. Although the domain of these applications is very heterogeneous, existing frameworks provide only limited flexibility to integrate diverse groupware applications in a meaningful way. We identify five variation points that a groupware framework needs to offer in a flexible way in order to facilitate the integration of diverse groupware applications. Based on these variation points, we propose a groupware framework called Agilo that tries to overcome the limited flexibility of existing frameworks by offering multiple realizations of these variation points and providing a modular architecture to simplify the integration of applications and the extensibility and adaptability to different application and integration requirements. | |||
| Autonomous and Self-sufficient Groups: Ad Hoc Collaborative Environments | | BIBA | Full-Text | 57-72 | |
| Joan Manuel Marquès; Leandro Navarro | |||
| Asynchronous collaborative applications and systems have to deal with complexities associated with interaction nature, idiosyncrasy of groups and technical and administrative issues of real settings. Existing solutions address asynchronous collaboration via simplified and centralized models. In this paper we present LaCOLLA, a fully decentralized middleware for building collaborative applications that provides general purpose collaborative functionality without requiring anyone to provide resources for the whole group. This helps applications to incorporate collaboration support and deal with most complexities derived from groups and its members. The implementation of LaCOLLA follows the peer-to-peer paradigm and pays special attention to the autonomy of its members and to the self-organization of its components. Resources (e.g. storage, task execution) and services (e.g. authorization) are provided by its members, avoiding dependency from third party agents or servers. This work was first validated by simulation. Then we built the middleware and adapted some collaborative applications. | |||
| Empowering End-Users: A Pattern-Centered Groupware Development Process | | BIBA | Full-Text | 73-88 | |
| Till Schümmer; Stephan Lukosch; Robert Slagter | |||
| When developing groupware satisfying user requirements is even more difficult than in the context of single-user application development; not only the interaction with the application itself but also the interaction between group members must be respected. Current design methodologies insufficiently focus the designers' attention to this aspect. Therefore, we propose the Oregon Software Development Process (OSDP) that fosters end-user participation, structures the interaction between end-users and developers, and emphasizes the use of a shared language between users and developers. | |||
| Integrating Synchronous and Asynchronous Interactions in Groupware Applications | | BIBA | Full-Text | 89-104 | |
| Nuno M. Preguiça; José Legatheaux Martins; Henrique João L. Domingos; Sérgio Duarte | |||
| It is common that, in a long-term asynchronous collaborative activity, groups of users engage in occasional synchronous sessions. In this paper, we discuss the data management requirements for supporting this common work practice. As users interact in different ways in each setting, requirements and solutions often need to be different. We present a data management system that allows to integrate a synchronous session in the context of a long-term asynchronous interaction, using the suitable data sharing techniques in each setting and an automatic mechanism to convert the long sequence of small updates produced in a synchronous session into a large asynchronous contribution. We exemplify the use of our approach with two multi-synchronous applications. | |||
| An Architectural Model for Component Groupware | | BIBA | Full-Text | 105-120 | |
| Cléver Ricardo Guareis de Farias; Carlos E. Gonçalves; Marta C. Rosatelli; Luís Ferreira Pires; Marten van Sinderen | |||
| This paper proposes an architectural model to facilitate the design of component-based groupware systems. This architectural model has been defined based on (1) three pre-defined component types, (2) a refinement strategy that relies on these component types, (3) the identification of layers of collaboration concerns, and (4) rules for the coupling and distribution of the components that implement these concerns. Our architectural model is beneficial for controlling the complexity of the development process, since it gives concrete guidance on the concerns to be considered and decomposition disciplines to be applied in each development step. The paper illustrates the application of this architectural model with an example of an electronic voting system. | |||
| An Architecture for Collaborative Geomodeling | | BIBA | Full-Text | 121-136 | |
| Luciano P. Reis; Alberto Barbosa Raposo; Jean-Claude Paul; Fabien Bosquet | |||
| This paper presents an architecture for distributed synchronous collaborative visualization and modeling applied to the geosciences. Our goal is to facilitate the creation of heterogeneous collaboration sessions, in which participants may use different versions of a core CAD application, configured with specific functionalities and multimedia user interfaces, through the composition of run-time plugins. We describe the domain requirements, the architectural concepts that facilitate the integration of our collaboration plugins with the core application, and the management of communication channels to allow the definition of role-based control policies adapted to specific types of sessions. | |||
| Remote Control Point Motion Prediction in Internet-Based Real-Time Collaborative Graphics Editing Systems | | BIBA | Full-Text | 137-144 | |
| Bo Jiang; Jiajun Bu; Chun Chen; Jianxv Yang | |||
| Monitoring the remote motion of objects or the control points of objects is one of the most important ways to promote awareness in Internet-based real-time collaborative graphics editing systems. However, such kind of remote control point motion is usually influenced by network jitter which leads to halting and jumping presence. Although motion prediction has been proved effective to complement the negative effect of jitter, the low accuracy of prediction remains a problem. In this paper, we present novel algorithms that can improve the accuracy to restore the remote motion smoothly and immediately. The prediction algorithms have been implemented in CoDesign -- a prototype system of collaborative graphics editing. Experiments were carried out to test the effectiveness of the algorithms and the results show that by applying effective remote motion prediction the usability of the system can be greatly enhanced. | |||
| Synchronization Contexts as a Means to Support Collaborative Modeling | | BIBA | Full-Text | 145-152 | |
| Niels Pinkwart | |||
| This paper presents an approach to support collaborative modeling with graph based representations. In particular, the problem of partially shared models with associated semantics is addressed, and an architectural solution to enable flexible modes of partial application synchronization under the constraint of retaining a common semantics in the shared model parts is presented. | |||
| Tailoring Infrastructures: Supporting Cooperative Work with Configurable Email Filters | | BIBA | Full-Text | 153-167 | |
| Volkmar Pipek; Markus Won; Roman Englert; Volker Wulf | |||
| In fragmented work settings like network organizations or virtual organizations, monolithic approaches to implement support for collaboration would require the actors involved to agree on the usage of the approach or tool under consideration. As the autonomy of actors in these settings makes this hard to achieve, we suggest an exploration and an increase in the end-user tailorability of basic software infrastructures to enable even actors in theses settings to tailor their collaboration support to their needs. An example for this strategy is illustrated by using email as a basic groupware technology. We use server-based email filters to improve the coordination of work processes and increase group awareness in these settings, and focus on making it easy for end users to understand and tailor the technology according to their needs. We use and enhance concepts from the discussion on the "tailorability" of CSCW systems (a visual filter composition language, a component-based architecture and additional support for exploration and documentation) to implement and evaluate our prototype. | |||
| A Collaborative Framework for Unexpected Exception Handling | | BIBA | Full-Text | 168-183 | |
| Hernâni Mourão; Pedro Antunes | |||
| This paper proposes a collaborative framework handling unexpected exceptions in Workflow Management Systems (WfMS). Unexpected exceptions correspond to unpredicted situations for which the system can not suggest any solutions. We introduce the notion that exception recovery is a collaborative problem solving activity that should be addressed through an intertwined play between several actors performing two types of tasks: (1) diagnosing situations; and (2) planning recovery actions. We propose a set of dimensions to classify the exceptional situations and their relations to recovery strategies. We also discuss the importance of monitoring recovery actions within the scope of diagnosis tasks. The proposed solution is implemented through a dedicated workflow. | |||
| A Workflow Mining Method Through Model Rewriting | | BIBA | Full-Text | 184-191 | |
| Jacques Wainer; Kwanghoon Kim; Clarence A. Ellis | |||
| This work presents a workflow process mining method that is, at least, as powerful as many others presented in the literature, as measured by the examples presented in the literature. The method is based on a grammar of rewriting expressions, by which a model is adapted to include a new execution trace. We also discuss the intrinsic limits of the mining process, which we believe has not been a topic clearly stated and discussed in the published research. | |||
| Design of an Object-Oriented Workflow Management System with Reusable and Fine-Grained Components | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 192-207 | |
| Gwan-Hwan Hwang; Yung-Chuan Lee; Sheng-Ho Chang | |||
| Languages that support object-oriented programming are now mainstream, and
can support software reuse. This study focused on the reusability of components
for workflow management systems (WfMSs). Implementing a WfMS in object-oriented
programming languages without considering the characteristics of the WfMS does
not ensure that all the components will be reusable. We first clarify the
reusability of WfMSs and point out the difficulties in constructing reusable
components for WfMSs. We then propose an object-oriented model for WfMSs named
the "Java-based object-oriented WfMS" (JOO-WfMS), whose components are
fine-grained and are classified into a functional stack with three layers. This
extends the reusability of objects in developing workflow applications. The
resulting architecture can support real-time flow control as well as the
dynamic instantiation of objects. Two mechanisms are embedded into the JOO-WfMS
to increase the reusability of its components: (1) a workflow failure-handling
language, which can increase the reusability of activities when flexible
failure recovery is necessary; and (2) the user communication components and
their corresponding architecture. The goal of the architecture is to increase
the reusability of codes used for communication between the user and the
activities in WfMSs. Keywords: Workflow Management System; Object-Oriented Programming Language; Software
Components; Reusability | |||
| Modeling the Behavior of Dispatching Rules in Workflow Systems: A Statistical Approach | | BIBA | Full-Text | 208-215 | |
| Gregório Baggio Tramontina; Jacques Wainer | |||
| Using scheduling techniques to reorder work in workflow systems can improve the performance of the business processes enacted by these systems. But this research area is still under-explored. This paper presents preliminary results on ongoing research on the modeling of the behavior of scheduling techniques in workflow systems using statistical analysis. It discusses the motivations for this approach and presents a first workflow scenario to be studied. Simulations of the use of dispatching rules to minimize the percentage of late cases are performed. The results are analyzed with statistical regression techniques to estimate functions that describe the observed data and compose a model to the behavior of the scheduling techniques. The model is evaluated against new data that was not present in the first observed data and the results show that it is feasible and could be used to assist systems administrators in applying scheduling techniques to workflow systems. | |||
| Collective Knowledge Recall: Benefits and Drawbacks | | BIBA | Full-Text | 216-231 | |
| Naiana Carminatti; Marcos R. S. Borges; José Orlando Gomes | |||
| Organizations frequently need to recall past events that, for some reason, were not adequately documented when they occurred. The successful reconstitution of past events depends on several variables, such as how long ago the event occurred, and whether key people are still in the organization. It also depends on the supporting process. This paper examines three knowledge recall methods and compares them in a controlled experiment. A group storytelling approach is used in two of the methods, one of which is supported by technology. The results obtained favor the group approach, but the advantages of technology support are not conclusive. The paper also evaluates the benefits and the drawbacks of using a supporting technology. | |||
| Developing Shared Context Within Group Stories | | BIBA | Full-Text | 232-247 | |
| Flávia Maria Santoro; Patrick Brézillon | |||
| Eliciting and re-using knowledge within an organization requires a very structured communication process among its employees in order to avoid misunderstanding and confusion. The transfer of knowledge among actors can only be successful if a common interpretative focus and its context are set up. So far, information about the real context that surrounded team's past activities can help their members to better understand situations at hand. In this paper, we argue that a combination of group storytelling technique and a groupware tool can help the elicitation and use of the context shared by a group. Moreover, our main goal is to discuss how groupware can help to structure and formalize the contextual information behind the scenes of a story told by a group, making it easier to understand, interpret and reuse the knowledge intrinsic to it. | |||
| Patterns of Collaboration and Non-collaboration Among Physicians | | BIBA | Full-Text | 248-254 | |
| Claudia Barsottini; Jacques Wainer | |||
| This work present an empirical evaluation of factors that discourage a stronger collaboration of physicians across time. By observing two different outpatient clinics in which a single patient is treated by a sequence of physicians for a long period, we were able to detect three aspects of a (paper) patient record that makes collaboration difficult: lack of diagnostic rationale, lack of treatment rationale and improper way of presenting the information contained in the patient record. | |||
| Shared Knowledge: The Result of Negotiation in Non-hierarchical Environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 255-262 | |
| Oriel A. Herrera; David A. Fuller | |||
| The knowledge building can be seen as a collaborative process of which
negotiation is a fundamental aspect. The use of technology to support this
process has been attempted in various groupware systems. However, there is no
adequate support system for the process of negotiation, which generally relies
on voting as the element for reaching agreement in decision-making. On the
other hand, the best approaches to this problem have been formalised in
learning environments where there is a clear hierarchical structure. When the
environment is not hierarchical, new problems arise which require special
attention. This article presents a model of knowledge building that has
negotiation as its basis in a group that is non-hierarchical in its structure.
The model is implemented on a prototype tool named ShaKnoMa, which is tested on
common tasks in an environment such as that proposed here. For the knowledge
representation, concept maps are used which act a scaffolding to classify,
index and search the information. Keywords: Knowledge-Building; Concept Maps; Group; Visual Language | |||
| A Mediation Model for Large Group Collaborative Teaching | | BIBA | Full-Text | 263-270 | |
| María Ester Lagos; Miguel Nussbaum; Francisca Capponi | |||
| The incorporation of computer resources into the classroom has given rise to the need for understanding how such technology can be used to achieve effective teaching practices. Collaborative learning aided by wirelessly connected mobile computers is a work mode that has generated benefits for student learning in small-group activities. It is therefore of interest to investigate whether these benefits are also present when working in large groups such as an entire class. This paper proposes a Mediation Model for Large Group Collaborative Teaching based on the interactions that occur between the components of a classroom technologically mediated using wirelessly connected mobile devices. A particular case of the model is presented, followed by an example of it in the form of a collaborative activity. | |||
| Analyzing the Organization of Collaborative Math Problem-Solving in Online Chats Using Statistics and Conversation Analysis | | BIBA | Full-Text | 271-283 | |
| Alan Zemel; Fatos Xhafa; Gerry Stahl | |||
| In this paper we describe how a statistical test on a hypothesis regarding collaborative math problem solving using online chats showed an unexpected result, whose understanding required the use of qualitative methods. The phenomenon behind the result is identified using Conversation Analysis. This paper demonstrates the importance of using qualitative methods to describe the perspective of participants as a way of interpreting statistical results, revising hypotheses and developing alternative coding schemes and procedures. The combined approach of quantitative and qualitative methods is applied on real data coming from Virtual Math Teams research project (Drexel University) and is identifying issues not addressed so far in the analysis of online collaborative group activity. | |||
| Collaboration for Learning Language Skills | | BIBA | Full-Text | 284-291 | |
| Luis A. Guerrero; Milko Madariaga; César A. Collazos; José A. Pino; Sergio F. Ochoa | |||
| A Collaborative activity is designed and a software tool is developed to support teaching grammar to primary education students. The activity is intended to create interdependencies among students. The software tool helps to implement the activity. Activity and tool were designed for teaching Spanish grammar, but they can be adapted for teaching other languages. | |||
| Collaborative IS Decision-Making: Analyzing Decision Process Characteristics and Technology Support | | BIBA | Full-Text | 292-307 | |
| Bjørn Erik Munkvold; Kristin Eim; Øyvind S. Husby | |||
| The paper presents an analysis of a collaborative decision-making process related to the selection and implementation of a new corporate solution for collaboration and information management in a Norwegian oil company. Several challenges were identified in the decision-making process, related to ensuring continuity between different phases, enabling efficient communication among the different stakeholder groups, and gaining involvement and commitment from the business areas. The analysis also focuses on the utilization of various collaboration technologies in the different phases of the decision-making process. The study contributes to increase our understanding of collaborative IS decision-making processes, and the role of collaboration technologies for supporting these. | |||
| Software Requirements Negotiation Using the Software Quality Function Deployment | | BIBA | Full-Text | 308-324 | |
| João Ramires; Pedro Antunes; Ana Respício | |||
| We propose a groupware tool supporting the Software Quality Function Deployment approach to software requirements validation. The design challenge is to involve several stakeholders, having conflicting views and attitudes which may be difficult to reconcile, in the requirements validation. The adopted approach integrates collaboration and negotiation support. Negotiation models inspired the development of a set of mechanisms promoting integrative attitudes and avoiding distributive ones. Experiments with the tool revealed some usability problems, but also showed that it is convenient to use and beneficial promoting consensus. | |||
| The Design and Field Evaluation of a Repeatable Collaborative Software Code Inspection Process | | BIBA | Full-Text | 325-340 | |
| Pushpa G. Koneri; Gert-Jan de Vreede; Douglas L. Dean; Ann L. Fruhling; Peter Wolcott | |||
| The use of software products in today's world has increased dramatically making quality an important aspect of software development. There is a continuous need to develop processes to control and increase software quality. Software code inspection is one way to pursue this goal. This paper presents a collaborative code inspection process that was designed during an action research study using Collaboration Engineering principles and techniques. Our inspection process was implemented as a sequence of thinkLets, chunks of facilitation skill, that were subsequently field tested in a traditional paper-based and Group Support System (GSS)-based environment. It was found to be successful in uncovering many major, minor as well as false-positive defects in inspected pieces of code. Results illustrate the process' efficiency in identifying duplicate defects thereby reducing follow-up time to correct each defect. The inspection process' flexibility was observed as it was successfully applied to inspect both pieces of code or an entire module. Overall the collaborative inspection process was considered to be productive for code inspection and was satisfactory for the inspectors involved. | |||
| Handheld-Based Electronic Meeting Support | | BIBA | Full-Text | 341-350 | |
| Gustavo Zurita; Nelson A. Baloian | |||
| Many studies have reported on the problems that arise when trying to carry out successful meetings. Various authors have developed computerized tools for supporting the different stages of a meeting, but most of these have been conceived for large PCs or Notebooks, which tend to distract the participants from face-to-face interaction. Also, many meetings are organized in a spontaneous manner, sometimes with no access to PCs. In this paper, we propose a meeting support tool for handhelds that overcomes many of the problems inherent in the use of devices with large screens. However, the small size of handheld displays leads to other problems, especially in human-handheld and human-human interactions. The system proposed here is designed using gesture and concept-map principles that enable these problems to be resolved. | |||
| Sharing Information Resources in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks | | BIBA | Full-Text | 351-358 | |
| H. Andrés Neyem; Sergio F. Ochoa; José A. Pino; Luis A. Guerrero | |||
| Many people are sharing digital resources through networks in order to facilitate, enhance or improve collaborative work. Information sharing is not only important to support collaborative work but it also represents the basis for design and implementation of solutions for typical design aspects of groupware applications, such as: floor control, group memory, shared objects replication and sessions and users management. Advances in mobile technology have extended the sharing information scenarios to Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), which has brought new challenges. This paper presents a simple service platform to share information resources among members of a MANET-supported groupware session. People interact using notebooks and PDAs. In addition, a shared presentation tool which has been developed using the services of the platform is described. This presentation tool can be used to assist other collaborative activities, such as: technical presentations, casual interactions, meetings for decision making and software technical reviews. | |||
| Towards a Model of Cooperation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 359-366 | |
| Adriana Santarosa Vivacqua; Jean-Paul A. Barthès; Jano Moreira de Souza | |||
| Researchers from several different domains have conducted studies about cooperation, and a wealth of different models and theories have been generated as a result. In this paper we describe an initial version of an integrative model for the initiation of cooperation, with the theoretical background from which it was created. Our main goals were to gain a better understanding, organize and structure the most important aspects and recurrent themes that show up in cooperative behavior research, adapting them when necessary. We are especially interested in the initiation of cooperation, and in the determination of factors that lead to the establishment of cooperative endeavors with the final goal of understanding what affects and how to encourage cooperation. A model such as this could be applied to groupware tools to increase the levels of cooperation between users. | |||
| Towards an Ontology for Context Representation in Groupware | | BIBA | Full-Text | 367-375 | |
| Vaninha Vieira; Patricia Azevedo Tedesco; Ana Carolina Salgado | |||
| An important issue in groupware is how to improve interaction and collaboration among participants. Through the analysis of the context a user is in or the context that surrounds an interaction, groupware systems can provide users with useful information in that situation. A relevant issue when using context is how to represent context information. Ontologies constitute an interesting method for representing context, since they enable information sharing and reuse. They can also be used by existing inference machines to reason about various contexts. In this paper we propose an ontology to formally represent context in groupware systems. We also present an example where this ontology is used by a logic-based reasoning mechanism for tool recommendation based on the current context of group members. We believe that this ontology could help to understand the role of context in collaboration and thus make the development of context-aware groupware systems easier. | |||