SUPPORTING AWARENESS IN ASYNCHRONOUS

COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Shang Gao

School of I.T., Deakin University

Geelong VIC 3217, Australia

Dongbai Xue, Igor Hawryszkiewycz

University of Technology, Sydney,

PO Box 123 Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia

Keywords:

Awareness, asynchronous collaborative environment, role.

Abstract:

One of the major challenges in asynchronous collaborative environment is to provide a sense of awareness

of other users actions. The amount of awareness needed varies due to speciﬁc roles users undertake during

collaboration. While emphasizing the importance of roles, this paper discussed awareness-role relationship

and proposed a role-based approach to specifying the awareness characteristics in asynchronous collaborative

environments. An example of implementation of role-based awareness supporting system LiveNet4 was also

illustrated at the end of this paper.

1 INTRODUCTION

Information that users have about each other’s ac-

tivities is commonly called awareness information

(Drury 2002). Awareness is important for effective

collaboration and coordination. It helps people know

who else is doing what in a shared workspace.

Jill Drury and Marian G. Williams summarized a

large number of deﬁnitions for awareness. Among

them, the most referenced deﬁnition of awareness is

deﬁned as “an understanding of the activities of oth-

ers, which provides a context for your own activities”

(Dourish 1992). Group-structural awareness is de-

scribed as “knowledge about such things as people’s

roles and responsibilities, their positions on an is-

sue, their status, and group processes” (Gutwin 1996).

Gutwin and Prinz both gave the deﬁnition of social

awareness: “the understanding that participants have

about the social connections within their group” and

“information about the presence and activities of peo-

ple in a shared environment” (Prinz 1999). Prinz

also described task-oriented awareness as “awareness

focused on activities performed to achieve a shared

task”. Workspace awareness is deﬁned as “the up-to-

the-minute knowledge of other participants’ interac-

tions with the shared workspace” and “who is work-

ing on what” in (Gutwin 1995) and (Vertegaal 1997),

respectively.

These deﬁnitions describe awareness in collabora-

tive environments from different point of view. Few

of them explains the dependent relationship between

awareness and role. For instance, the ﬁrst deﬁni-

tion of group-structural awareness “knowledge about

such things as people’s roles and responsibilities, ...”

(Gutwin 1996) suggested granted roles as a kind of

awareness information, but did not reveal their deeper

relationship.

Despite diversity of functionality and appearance

of collaborative environments, there always have four

key aspects in collaboration: people, artifact, action

and activity.

• People is the subject of an action while artifact act-

ing as the object.

• Actions performed by people are restricted by their

assigned roles.

• Activity is the place where people acts on artifact.

Their relationship can be described as people with

roles aiming at goals act on artifacts in an activity. Ar-

tifact is considered as input and output of people’s ac-

tion. Activity is a space containing people with roles,

artifacts and their action relationships (Gao 2003).

A collaborative environment may consist of sev-

eral activities, with each other which containing role-

taking participants, artifacts, and even sub-activities,

as illustrated in Fig. 1 (a). Usually there are two kinds

of artifacts involved: an artifact containing follow-ups

is called a container artifact, like a meeting, a calen-

dar, a ﬁle folder or a discussion forum; a simple arti-

fact contains no other artifacts, like a URL, a text ﬁle

355

Gao S., Xue D. and Hawryszkiewycz I. (2005).

SUPPORTING AWARENESS IN ASYNCHRONOUS COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pages 355-358

DOI: 10.5220/0001231703550358

 SciTePress

or a documentation. An activity is treated as a special

container artifact. In this paper, activity is chosen as

an analysis unit for awareness supporting. Given it is

common that an artifact is shared by multiple collab-

orative activities, copied artifact link is allowed for

information sharing. Detailed information about the

activity, role, artifact, participant and their relation-

ship can be found in (Gao 2003).

Different roles have different awareness require-

ments. For instance, in a software development

project, a project manager needs to be aware of

each task’s progress, milestone achieved, and major

changes made. While a general member may only

need to know the task assigned to him and changes

made relevant to his/her task.

Therefore, to determine who should know what,

ﬁrstly we need to deﬁne an awareness information

space for each activity, resolving ”what to know”

problem; secondly apply role restrictions on this

awareness information space to produce sub-space for

each speciﬁc role, resolving ”who know what” prob-

lem.

In this paper, we focus on supporting awareness for

role based asynchronous collaborative environment.

Whilst emphasizing the importance of roles that peo-

ple take on, we analyze related work on awareness,

then proposes a role-based approach to specifying the

awareness characteristics. After that, relationships

between awareness, role, and awareness information

space are discussed. A real system implementation of

this approach is illustrated at the end of this paper.

(a)

(b) (c)

people with role actionactivity artifactpeople with rolepeople with role actionactionactivityactivity artifactartifact

Figure 1: An example of activity (a) An activity with roles

and artifacts (b)(c) Different roles have different views of

activity

2 ROLE-BASED AWARENESS

Knowledge of an activity comprises information

about all the artifacts, people, roles and their relation-

ship, including

• knowledge of participants involved in activity

• knowledge of artifacts manipulated in activity, and

• knowledge of roles’ responsibility in activity

The ﬁrst part represents people aspect information,

such as who is taking which role and where partici-

pants are. The second part represents artifact aspect,

such as which artifact is manipulable, and who has

made what changes and when. The third part de-

scribes the dependent relationship between role and

action, such as which action is permitted by which

role. All the activity speciﬁc awareness information

composes an information space, called the awareness

information space of this activity, denoted by H

(See

Fig.2 (a)). Awareness information space H

is a set.

Given diverse awareness requirements depend on

diverse roles, a role-based awareness that deﬁnes one

role has of another role is described as follows:

Deﬁnition 1 Given two roles R

and R

in an activity

of an asynchronous collaborative environment, if R

has the knowledge of R

’s activity, we say role R

has

the awareness of role R

in this activity.

Similarly, knowledge of role R

’s activity com-

prises information about R

’s group people, manip-

ulable artifacts and R

itself, as listed below.

• knowledge of participants involved in R

• knowledge of artifacts under R

’s control

• knowledge of role R

’s responsibility in activity

The ﬁrst part speciﬁes who is taking role R

. The

second part contains artifacts that R

can manipulate

and relevant changes made by whom at what time.

The third part describes what actions are permitted

under R

. All the awareness information composes

an information sub-space, called R

’s awareness in-

formation space in this activity, denoted by H

. It is

easy to prove that H

is a subset of H

Assuming H

is a countable set, we can obtain

role R

’s awareness information space H

by apply-

ing R

-speciﬁc mapping on H

, as shown in Fig. 2

(b)(c).

information about people and undertaken role

awareness information space

artifact and its properties

Relationship between role and action

information about people and undertaken roleinformation about people and undertaken role

awareness information spaceawareness information space

artifact and its properties

Relationship between role and actionRelationship between role and action

(a) (b) (c)

Figure 2: An awareness information space H

and two sub-

spaces (a) awareness information space H

(b)(c)two sub-

spaces of H

2.1 Complete and partial awareness

It is possible that role R

has complete access to role

’s awareness information space H

, or has partial

access to it. The deﬁnition of role R

determines the

WEBIST 2005 - WEB INTERFACES AND APPLICATIONS

356

dimensions of H

, while the deﬁnition of role R

lim-

its the access dimensions of R

to H

. Here we bor-

row two terms from (Drury 2002) to describe these

two kinds of awareness:

Deﬁnition 2 Given two roles R

and R

in an activity

of an asynchronous collaborative environment, if R

has a complete access to R

’s awareness information

space H

, we say role R

has the complete awareness

of role R

in this activity.

Deﬁnition 3 Given two roles R

and R

in an activity

of an asynchronous collaborative environment, if R

has a partial access to R

’s awareness information

space H

, we say role R

has a partial awareness of

role R

in this activity.

It is also possible that role R

has no access to H

which is an extreme situation of partial awareness. In

this case, we say role R

has empty awareness of role

in that activity.

Each awareness can be obtained by set operations

on role R

’s awareness information spaces H

and

’s awareness information spaces H

. Fig. 3 (a)

represents complete awareness if set H

and H

are

equal, namely H

= H

. Fig. 3 (b) illustrates how

partial awareness is obtained if intersection of H

and

is not empty, namely H

∩ H

6= ∅. If the in-

tersection is empty, as shown in Fig.3 (c), role R

and R

have empty awareness of each other, namely

∩ H

= ∅.

information about people and undertaken role

awareness information space

artifact and its properties

Relationship between role and action

information about people and undertaken roleinformation about people and undertaken role

awareness information spaceawareness information space

artifact and its properties

Relationship between role and actionRelationship between role and action

(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 3: Complete and partial awareness represented

by awareness information spaces (a) Complete awareness

(b)Partial awareness (c) No awareness

2.2 Relationship between role and

awareness information space

Before discussing relationship between role and

awareness information space, we assume participants

undertaking the same role have the same awareness

needs. If people with different roles have an equal

awareness information space, it suggests the deﬁni-

tion of roles might not be appropriate from informa-

tion management point of view because they do not

differentiate from each other. In reality, it is almost

impossible to have two equal awareness information

spaces existing in one activity. However, if overlap-

ping is more than, say 90 percent, it also suggests

some potential role deﬁnition problems.

One way to differentiate one role from the others is

to reﬁne its role responsibilities. For instance, three

teachers undertake the same teacher role in a course

delivering activity and their routine tasks are not to-

tally the same. Teacher A is in charge of delivering

lecture; teacher B is a lab instructor and teacher C is

an on-line instructor and assignment marker. Obvi-

ously their awareness information spaces should not

be deﬁned equally. A good solution can be reﬁning

the teacher role into three separate roles, for instance,

lecturer, tutor and marker. Clear and precise deﬁni-

tion for role responsibilities and awareness informa-

tion space boundaries is important for efﬁcient col-

laboration and coordination.

On the contrary, several roles can be merged to a

new role if their awareness information spaces need

to be expanded. For instance, an assignment marker

and an exam marker can be taking an assessor role to

access the expanded awareness information space.

A new role can also be created if access to intersec-

tion of several roles’ awareness information spaces is

necessary and no existing roles currently satisfy the

demand.

So far we have discussed role-based awareness, dif-

ferent awareness types and relationship between role

and awareness information space. One more thing

still needs to be clariﬁed: how the information within

awareness information space is reﬂected and utilized

in an activity, for instance, what sort of tools or func-

tionality should be implemented for awareness sup-

port?

We constitute a general speciﬁcation for role-based

activity in asynchronous collaborative environment as

follows:

• Show the changes being made

• Show the historical changes made

• Show the time of each historical change and corre-

sponding contributor

• Show people’ identities and roles

• Show area viewable by each role

• Show the artifacts being manipulated and their re-

sponsible roles

3 AWARENESS SUPPORTING IN

LIVENET4

A number of features that explicitly address the above

awareness speciﬁcations have been implemented in

LiveNet4, a role-based workplace network for the col-

laborative knowledge sharing.

SUPPORTING AWARENESS IN ASYNCHRONOUS COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS

357

The major awareness features implemented are:

• Activity summary

Activity portal after login provides a summary of

activity information, including numbers of involved

roles, participants, artifacts and recent update time.

• Change reminder icons

Any changes of artifact result in a corresponding

reminder icon (eg. new or updated) attached with the

titles of itself and of all the upper level container arti-

facts.

• Activity notiﬁcation

It is an optional feature used to conﬁgure personal

account to have activity notiﬁcation active or inactive

via email . Notiﬁcation ﬁlter can be set for the whole

activity or for some particular artifacts in the hierar-

chical artifact structure.

• People login status

At the lower left corner of LiveNet4 activity page,

there is a participant list displaying who is currently

logging in. To exploit awareness, a synchronous chat

room is also provided. The right part of activity page

displays the viewable artifacts by a login role.

• Forum discussion

People can create threaded discussion area. Each

posted message is in text format, with its contributor

and creation time.

• Calendar

People can create a personal calendar or a group

calendar as critical date reminder. It can provide an

overview of all the relevant artifacts created on a par-

ticular date or during a given period, for instance,

within a day, a week, a month or a year.

• Search and sort

A search facility is provided to ﬁnd viewable ar-

tifacts quickly within an activity. Artifacts can be

sorted on type, name, contributed or modiﬁed time.

Detailed information about the component-based

architecture of LiveNet4 and Model-View-Controller

implementation on J2EE platform can be found in

(Gao 2003) and its relevant references. Because of

the page limits, full screen shots could not be pro-

vided here. Interested readers can try the LiveNet4

system at http://livenet4.it.uts.edu.au.

4 DISCUSSION

This paper analyzes awareness needs for asynchro-

nous collaboration, specifying the dependent relation-

ship between awareness and role, giving the descrip-

tions of role-based awareness, awareness informa-

tion space, and complete and partial awareness. Role

can be reﬁned or merged by checking different roles’

awareness spaces. Speciﬁcations of awareness infor-

mation inside of awareness information space H

are

also suggested. Based on the role-based awareness,

several supporting tools are implemented in collabo-

rative environment LiveNet4.

Given the awareness needs are analyzed from the

basic aspects of collaboration, the role-based map-

ping approach can be extended to synchronous collab-

orative environment with little revision. For instance,

the awareness information space for synchronous ap-

plication should also contain synchronous operation

information, such as who is using which tool doing

what.

For a given collaborative environment, a role’s

awareness information space is a projection of H

restricted by the role deﬁnition. Changes of role

responsibilities result in the corresponding dimen-

sion changes of awareness information space. More

awareness information can be provided by deﬁning a

loose role. Similarly awareness information can be

reﬁned by deﬁning a strict role.

REFERENCES

Drury, J., Williams, M. (2002), “A framework for role-

based speciﬁcation and evaluation of awareness sup-

port in synchronous collaborative applications”, Pro-

ceedings of the 11th IEEE International Workshops on

Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collabora-

tive Enterprises (WETICE’02).

Gutwin, C., S. Greenberg and M. Roseman (1996),

“Workspace awareness in real-time distributed group-

ware: framework, widgets, and evaluation”, Proceed-

ings of the HCI’96 on People and Computers XI.

Springer-Verlag, London, August, pp. 281-298.

Dourish, P. and V. Bellotti (1992), “Awareness and co-

ordination in shared workspaces, Proceedings of

CSCW’92. ACM, Toronto, Canada.

Gutwin, C., G. Startk and S. Greenberg (1995), “Sup-

port for workspace awareness in educational group-

ware”, Proceedings of Computer Supported Collabo-

rative Learning (CSCL’95), ACM.

Prinz, W.(1999), “An awareness environment for coopera-

tive settings”, Proceedings of the 16th European Con-

ference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

(ESCSW’99). Copenhagen, Kluwer Associates.

Vertegaal, R., B. Velichkovsky and G. V.D. Veer (1997),

“Catching the eye: management of joint attention in

cooperative work”, SIGCHI Bulletin, vol.4 no. 29, pp.

87-92

Gao, S. and Hawryszkiewycz, I. T. (2003), “Component-

based Collaborative Virtual Environment”, Proceed-

ing of International Conference on Information Tech-

nology: Research and Education (ITRE 2003),

Newark, New Jersey, USA.

Drury, J. (2001), “Extending usability inspection evalua-

tion techniques for synchronous collaborative com-

puting applications”, Department of Computer Sci-

ence. Lowell, University of Massachusetts Lowell.

WEBIST 2005 - WEB INTERFACES AND APPLICATIONS

358