Project-Team : ecoo
Section: New Results
Group awareness
Group awareness models and mechanisms have a central situation in the cooperative applications that we are concerned with, because they interact directly with users and are largely responsible for tool acceptation. They allow each participant to be aware of other participants activities, enhancing in this way the synergy, the coordination, the communication and the social links in the group.
We develop two main activities related to awareness in groupware systems. The first one focus on awareness and context, and the second one is dedicated to awareness in knowledge management systems.
Group Awareness and Context
Participants : Gérôme Canals, Christophe Bouthier, Sauwsan Alshattnawi.
The aim of this work is to build awareness mechanisms capable of scaling up to large groups and supporting important heterogeneity in usage situations. Our approach to address theses two requirements is based on adapting the awareness service to the local work and usage context of each user. Delivered awareness information and the delivery modalities are then specific to each user depending on their role, activity, interaction modality, personal preferences, and device, and thus more pertinent to the individual situation.
A first step toward this goal was to build a peer-to-peer architecture for a context based awareness service. This architecture was implemented in an experimental prototype [11]. This architecture is based on an explicit context representation at each peer. This representation is based on a set of Bayesian networks that compute local and remote low-level events to deduce more high level facts. The local context of each user is described by the status of the local networks. The adaptation engine we use is a rule based engine that takes decisions each time the local context representation is updated. This decision may concern the dissemination of the information in the change is due to a local event, or the presentation of the information if the change is due to a remote event. In this first work, adaptation decisions concern the potential recipient and the level of details (disseminated information), the modality (query based, peripheral, and intrusive) and the time (immediate, delayed, and cancelled) of the delivery. The context representation is restricted to only the work and activity context of the participants.
Our actual work on this approach concern its extension in order to integrate it with a cooperative platform, and to integrate new events in the context computation. The goal is to get a more complete context representation by adding information and events from the cooperative platform (groups, users, activities) and from the physical usage context (connectivity, device, localisation, ...). A first study has been done about how to extend the architecture to capture and aggregate events from the cooperative platform and how to combine them with events from the local peers.
Awareness and Knowledge-intensive Communities
Participants : Gérôme Canals, Alicia Diaz.
The goal of this work is to provide support to workgroups engaged in a knowledge-intensive activity (e.g. a design project, a software project) to capitalize and share common knowledge. We particularly focus on mechanisms to make explicit the shared emergent knowledge and to support individual and divergent point of views about this emergent knowledge.
Awareness plays a central role in our approach. On one hand, awareness is the main source for knowledge discovery and learning about other's activity and skills. On the other hand, awareness is helpful to understand the evolution of the shared knowledge and the occurrence of divergent points of view about this knowledge [3], [13].
We already have proposed a framework based on a private/public knowledge workspace to store the emergent knowledge. Divergences between individual points of views are supported through encapsulation in discussion artefacts organized in discussion threads. This allows keeping track of knowledge evolution in parallel with the arguments and contribution from the participants. We have also introduced the notion of knowledge awareness as the central mechanism for being aware and understanding knowledge contribution and evolution in a group.
This framework has been instantiated with a particular knowledge representation model in a prototype called Co-Protégé [14]. Co-Protégé is an extension of Protégé and we use the Protégé language to build ontologies that represent the shared knowledge as well as discussion artefacts and threads, activities and member profiles.
In collaboration with the University of New South Wales (Australia), this framework has also been applied to support mass customization processes [12].
Perspectives
Concerning awareness and context, a short term perspective is to finish the technical integration of our approach in the ECOO cooperative platform. The goal is enhance this platform with an awareness service that take into account the work context of each user when delivering awareness information.
Concerning awareness and knowledge, short termed perspectives rely on the prototype and its evaluation. The actual prototype will be extended to support OWL as the ontology definition language. A first step toward its evaluation is to prepare it for dissemination in the Protégé community.
