AWARENESS IN PROJECT INFORMATION SPACES FOR

IMPROVED COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION

Stefan Boddy, Matthew Wetherill

Salford Centre for Research and Innovation, University of Salford, The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WT, U.K.

Yacine Rezgui

School of the Built Environment, University of Salford, The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WT, U.K.

Grahame Cooper

School of Computing, Sicence and Engineering, University of Salford, The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WT, U.K.

Keywords: Collaborative environments, activity awareness, process transparency.

Abstract: The paper argues that facilitating timely and contextually grounded communication could help improve both

coordination and decision making / problem solving in the construction project process. The paper discusses

the authors’ previous work in construction IT, as well as related literature, and the findings that have led to

the development of a framework for awareness of activity in project information spaces. A detailed

description of the conceptual model and software architecture of the proposed resource awareness

framework is given, followed by directions for future research.

1 INTRODUCTION

Lack of communication and coordination has often

been cited as a cause of problems in the construction

project process (Latham 1994, Egan 1998).

Researchers have deployed information technology

to ameliorate the detrimental effects resulting in a

history of tools aimed at the management of project

information. These tools have focussed on the

versioning and consistency of information across

projects and have culminated in the development of

project extranets and building information

modelling. Some initiatives have taken a knowledge

oriented approach in an effort to improve the

communication of information within projects,

whilst others have looked into organisational issues

in order to model the structures and processes

typically involved in a construction project and how

they may be supported with IT. The authors have

undertaken research work in all of these fields and

this paper reports on ongoing research extending this

work into more pro-active support for interpersonal

communication within construction projects. The

aim of the research is to facilitate communication at

opportune moments and assess whether or not such

facilitation can further improve coordination and

decision quality and creativity in the project process.

2 BACKGROUND

The authors have conducted research into the

management of information and its alignment with

the project process and on ways and means of using

that information in a distributed or virtual team

setting (Boddy et al., 2007). This work has spanned

a number of funded projects beginning with the

Commit project, which defined an information

management model (The Commit Information

Management Model or CIMM) for construction

projects. The CIMM featured constructs for

information versioning, ownership, rights

management and decision tracking (Rezgui et al

1998).

Following on from Commit, the Advanced

Decision Support (ADS) project extended the

101

Boddy S., Wetherill M., Rezgui Y. and Cooper G. (2008).

AWARENESS IN PROJECT INFORMATION SPACES FOR IMPROVED COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION.

In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - SAIC, pages 101-106

DOI: 10.5220/0001691401010106

 SciTePress

CIMM with elements for interoperation with

common desktop applications via a plug-in adapter

architecture. ADS placed particular emphasis on the

information versioning and dependency tracking

aspects of the CIMM culminating in software for the

recording of versions and the rationale for the

changes made in particular versions of information

elements (Cooper et al 2005).

With the OSMOS project, information was

viewed more as a collection of semantically linked

resources and we also started the move to a service

oriented platform for virtual team support. A model

for instantiating and running a virtual team, The

Generic VE Process Model (Rezgui, 2007a; Rezgui

2007b), was created as the conceptual framework

around which the services were specified and

implemented.

The e-Cognos project developed the semantic

linkage elements further. Automated creation of

links was integrated into the platform with the aim

of mimicking some of the knowledge socialisation

processes in groups. This yielded a system which

implicitly identified and supported knowledge

communities within the user population. The system

also provided services for maintenance of

information (versioning, change notification etc) and

for push and pull of information around the system

(subscribing to information, flagging to interested

parties etc) (Wetherill et al 2002).

Each project created a software demonstrator,

which was evaluated with its industrial

collaborators. The evaluations yielded feedback with

common themes around information maintenance in

the guise of tracking and transparency of activity in

the project process. For example, the e-Cognos

evaluation revealed that this type of functionality,

including real time information on current project

activity, was rated as moderately to highly important

(e-Cognos 2002), though the e-Cognos software

only met such goals at a very basic level. The field

trials for the ADS software validated the activity and

decision rationale records kept as a valuable aspect

of information management. Evaluators noted

however that more could be done with the

information captured. We concur and believe that by

further exploiting the mechanisms by which the

ADS software captures activity, we can improve the

real-time information management capabilities of

our research outputs. If we can leverage that

information in rendering the ongoing state of project

activity more transparent to those working within it,

we believe we can facilitate interpersonal

communications that take place at appropriate times

and within the context of related aspects of the

project work. Such timely and contextually

grounded communication we believe may help to

improve both coordination and decision

making/problem solving in the project process.

3 THE SOCIAL DIMENSION OF

COLLABORATION

In light of our aim to support timely and

contextualised communication and collaboration, we

started thinking about the social structures and

processes involved. In the authors’ experience, it is

at the boundaries between disciplines within

construction projects that the most crucial

collaborations occur. These boundaries are typically

also organisational and knowledge boundaries

defining the physical and social groupings of

individuals and resources within a project.

Coordination in construction projects is a problem

primarily of resolving differences at the social,

organisational and physical system boundaries. The

resolution and successful integration of physical

system interface issues comes about as a result of

collaboration at the discipline or social interfaces by

explicating and transforming the knowledge in the

discipline groups across the boundaries between

them. The literature on collaboration, particularly

collaborative design, has much to say about the

boundaries between the various socio-technical

groupings involved in the design process. Star

(1989) introduced the concept of boundary objects,

which are physical or conceptual artefacts existing at

the boundaries between communities, but which

span those boundaries to become the shared context

through which the communities can collaborate.

Studies conducted into the formulation, use and

effects of boundary objects, a number of them taking

the construction industry as their knowledge domain,

have been conducted. Gal et al (2004) for example,

in their research into the effects of boundary objects

on the constitution and identity of social groups

within processes identified CAD files, both 2D

drawings and 3D models, as crucial boundary

objects in a construction context.

Other research into collaborative design

environments has highlighted the need for them to

be open and transparent to enable a creative and

productive discourse. The research into

Communities of Practice (COP (Wenger 1998)) has

illustrated the ways in which interactions within a

ICEIS 2008 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

102

community influence the generation and sharing of

knowledge associated with the practice. Fischer et al

(2005) cite the potential of Communities of Interest

(COI) for increasing creativity in design problem

solving. A COI shares some characteristics of COP,

but is generally comprised of a broader spectrum of

individuals from differing professional and social

backgrounds. The common interest is the pursuit of

a particular goal (such as a project) rather than the

sharing and development of knowledge in a

particular sphere of practice. Thus a COI,

encompassing a broader spectrum of knowledge can

stimulate different solutions to problems than would

have been likely with individuals or single discipline

groups. All of this has resonance for construction

projects where to some extent decision making but

particularly coordination, tend to be distributed

activities that could benefit from timely

communication between those involved.

4 COLLABORATION,

AWARENESS AND

WORKSPACES

In addition to boundary objects, our investigations

into previous collaboration research from a social

standpoint have emphasised the importance of

openness and transparency in successful

collaborations (Fischer et al 2005). Erickson and

Kellog have written on what they term ‘social

translucence’, and cite the essential characteristics of

socially translucent systems as:

• Visibility – the visibility of socially

significant information

• Awareness – of the presence and/or actions

of others

• Accountability – for one’s own actions in

the context furnished by visibility and

awareness

(Erickson & Kellogg 2000)

They argue that systems exhibiting these

characteristics can help to replicate social cues we

rely upon in interpersonal communication in a

digital context. Visibility and awareness have been

research themes in the field of computer supported

cooperative work (CSCW) for some time and some

of the early outputs employ mechanisms that

Dourish & Bellotti (1992) refer to as Role

Restrictive. Here a person’s role within a system

implies information about their likely activity within

the system. Roles however are rejected as rather

limited as an activity awareness mechanism as they

only furnish information about the “character of the

activity, not the content” (Dourish & Bellotti 1992).

Another mechanism, the Informational mechanism,

is identified wherein the users of a system are

responsible for creating and distributing information

for the consumption of other users. Again this is

rejected as too burdensome on the users of the

system. Because the content and delivery of

awareness information is controlled by the producer

using these mechanisms, what is received may be

neither relevant nor timely in the context of the

receiver. Dourish & Bellotti propose a mechanism

they term Shared Feedback wherein the system itself

monitors and redistributes information about the

activities of users. The proposal allows users of the

system to negotiate their activities as appropriate to

the current context and objective such that a user

may fulfil several different functions throughout the

course of the collaboration.

Concurrent with Dourish and Bellotti’s work,

Benford and Falhen (1993) were researching the

notion of awareness in virtual reality spaces. Their

work resulted in the influential Spatial Model of

Awareness used to establish the level of mutual

awareness and potential for interaction between

objects in a virtual space. The model employed

several factors in its calculations:

• Space, Objects and Medium – Space is the

entire volume of the virtual world. Objects

are the artefacts populating that world.

Medium refers to the interfaces through

which interactions between objects in the

space occur.

• Aura – Defined as the part of the space

(sub-space) that bounds an object with

respect to a particular medium and

determines the extent of its presence within

that medium. Two aura must collide for any

interaction to be possible

• Focus, Nimbus and Awareness – Given a

collision of auras, Focus and Nimbus

determine the level of interaction in a given

medium:

o Focus is directed attention from an

object A to an object B – “the

more an object (B) is within your

(A) focus, the more you are aware

of it.” (Benford et al 1994).

o “Nimbus is a sub-space in which

an object makes some aspect of

itself available to others” – “The

more an object is within your

AWARENESS IN PROJECT INFORMATION SPACES FOR IMPROVED COMMUNICATION AND

COLLABORATION

103

Figure 1: Framework Conceptual Model.

nimbus, the more aware it is of

you.” (Benford et al 1994)

The spatial model has found application in a

number of experimental VR environments over time.

Gutwin & Greenberg (2001) investigated groups

collaborating through shared workspaces as part of

groupware applications. They defined a general

framework of issues to consider in the design of

awareness systems. The framework identifies three

broad areas of concern:

• The components of awareness – The

essential information for awareness in a

shared group workspace? Basically the

who, when, where and what of the activity

in the space.

• The maintenance of awareness – How to

collect and present that information and

keep it up to date.

• The use of awareness in collaboration –

When and where to present that

information, based on observation of where

awareness information is normally used.

This research has value as a guide for thinking

about the requirements of any system to provide

awareness information, a guide which has informed

our thought processes in formulating our proposals.

We believe that monitoring activity on

informational resources that form potential boundary

objects may help to identify opportune moments to

facilitate communication. We can leverage derived

relationships between objects to identify people who

are working on related aspects of the project at the

same time and thereby facilitate them in

communicating and collaborating to achieve better

coordination and decisions in their work.

5 PROPOSED FRAMEWORK

The conceptual framework for our system to

leverage potential boundary objects in facilitating

communication is described below. Figure 1 shows

the general concept of our system, which is based on

the resources involved in or created and manipulated

in a construction project. These are the resources

some of which would typically constitute the

boundary objects for collaboration in the project in

the traditional sense, certainly during the design

stages. They are also the objects the production of

which is directly related to the level of activity and

progress apparent in the project process at any given

time. Thus reporting on activity on these objects

makes the process more transparent to those

involved in it.

The diagram comprises four layers from the

bottom as follows:

1. Application data layer – this layer

represents the digital data of a project.

Objects in this layer are those that are

often cited as boundary objects in the

literature.

ICEIS 2008 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

104

2. Application software layer – this layer

represents the actual tools used to create

and manipulate the data at layer 1.

3. Resource abstraction layer – this layer

represents a set of abstract representations

of the data at layer 1. The lines between

items in this layer represent relationships

between them, which are automatically

created by the system

4. User layer – this layer represents the

system users.

As a user works with their applications the

system tracks the interactions and records which

resources are involved. This tracking is performed

for all users of the system constantly, thus the

system knows who is working with what at any

given moment. If the system finds that two related

resources are being manipulated by two different

users concurrently, it will inform those users of each

other’s activity on the basis that a relation between

resources may indicate a need to coordinate the

work. The system thus provides a context within

which the users can decide if they need or want to

take action. Our framework then, employs a

mechanism similar to Dourish and Bellotti’s shared

feedback (Dourish and Bellotti 1992), but

subsequently applies a filter based on the

relationships between resource abstractions. The

abstractions themselves could be said to be

candidate boundary objects for collaboration.

6 RESOURCE AWARENESS

ENVIRONMENT

Our implementation of this proposal is partly based

on previous research work carried out at the

University of Salford (with partners) under the

auspices of the ADS project. The ADS software

architecture featured a core for the management of

version information, augmented with plug-ins that

allowed the core to interoperate with standard

software applications. It is in the plug-ins that the

level of granularity of information item to be

handled is set. The level could be the entire data file

handled by an underlying application, or it could be

some object defined by the object model of the

application, or any stage in-between. This allows for

flexibility in implementing plug-ins for different

applications and types of data/information. A plug-in

is responsible for triggering notifications to the ADS

core that a user is performing an action that changes

information items in a way that we are interested in

recording. It also sends metadata to the core about

what changed, what information items were

involved, who made the changes and when and

allows the user to provide an explanation of the

rationale for the change. Thus ADS already records

for us most of the information that Gutwin and

Greenberg defined as the ‘components of awareness’

(Gutwin & Greenberg 2001)

We have augmented the ADS software

architecture with new modules dedicated to the

creation of resource abstractions and links between

those abstractions. Each of these modules also works

on a plug-in system whereby it is possible to register

plug-ins that ‘understand’ different types of

resources, or different ways in which to create

abstractions of a resource. For example, our initial

implementation of an abstraction module is based on

simple keyword extraction and indexing. Likewise,

our first link creation module uses search techniques

on the keyword index to create links between

resource abstractions. We are aware that this is a

very naïve implementation of our activity awareness

concept as it may produce links between resources

that have relatively little to do with each other in real

terms. At this stage in the development however, we

have been more concerned with developing the

framework than the details of individual abstraction

mechanisms. As the research is carried forward,

more sophisticated abstraction and linking

mechanisms will be developed, with those handling

geometric data perhaps having the greatest promise

for finding genuinely related parts of the

construction project based on the evolving building

model where one exists.

We have altered the software architecture of the

original ADS system in other ways. Firstly, we have

created a server-based core to the system, which

communicates with an ADS client application on

each user’s local machine. It is this client application

that handles interaction with user application plug-

ins. We have chosen this route to take some of the

processing load off of the server and also to reduce

network traffic to some degree. As such the system

now comprises of a core, a local client at each user’s

machine and a number of application plug-ins, also

at each user’s machine. Of course, in this enhanced

version of the ADS software, application plug-ins

take on a broader range of functions. In particular, a

plug-in must now be designed to show activity

notifications using UI elements judged to be most

appropriate to the application being instrumented to

work with ADS.

AWARENESS IN PROJECT INFORMATION SPACES FOR IMPROVED COMMUNICATION AND

COLLABORATION

105

7 CONCLUSIONS

This paper has discussed the authors’ previous work

in construction IT and the findings that have led us

to develop a framework for awareness of activity in

project information spaces. We have reviewed a

sample of the previous research work in the areas of

collaboration and workspace awareness that has

informed our thinking on the conceptual

underpinnings of our framework, particularly issues

related to boundary objects and how they may be

leveraged to actively promote timely communication

and collaboration, and then function in their normal

role as the context for that communication and

collaboration. We have gone on to describe the

conceptual model and software architecture of our

framework in more detail such that its operation can

be understood.

As we have already alluded to, this is a report on

ongoing research and as such we envisage future

publications detailing the results of field trials

amongst industrial collaborators. Further, we intend

to research and develop more sophisticated methods

and modules for resource abstraction and relation

building, particularly modules dealing with spatial

information of the type embedded in building

models such that we can ‘locate’ people’s current

activity relative to the geometry of the evolving

design.

REFERENCES

Arias, E., Eden, H., Fischer, G., Gorman, A. and Scharff,

E., 2000. “Transcending the Individual Human Mind –

Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative

Design”, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human

Interaction, Vol. 7(1) pp 84-113

Benford, S.D., Bowers, J., Fahlen, L.E. and Greenhalgh,

C., 1994. “Managing Mutual Awareness in

Collaborative Virtual Environments”, Proceedings of

VRST’94, Singapore, August 1994.

Boddy, S, Rezgui, Y., Cooper, G., Wetherill, M., 2007.

Computer Integrated Construction: A review and

Proposals for Future Directions, Advances in

Engineering Software (Elsevier), 38(10), pp. 677-687.

Cooper G, Cerulli C, Lawson B R, Peng C and Rezgui Y.,

2005. “Tracking Decision-Making During

Architectural Design”, ITcon Vol. 10, pp. 125-139.

Dourish, P. and Bellotti, V., 1992. “Awareness and

coordination in shared workspaces”, Proceedings of

the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer Supported

Cooperative Work, Toronto, Ontario Canada, 1992.

102-114

e-Cognos, 2002. “e-Cognos evaluation results”, e-Cognos

project report available http://e-

cognos.cstb.fr/Downloads/WP4/e-COGNOS-D4.2.pdf

Egan, J., 1998. “Rethinking Construction: Report of the

Construction Task Force” HMSO, London.

Erickson, T. and Kellogg, W.A., 2000. “Social

Translucence: an approach to designing systems that

support social processes”, ACM Transactions on

Human Computer Interaction 7(1) 59–83, 2000.

Fischer, G., Giaccardi, E., Eden, H., Sugimoto, M. and Ye,

Y., 2005. “Beyond binary choices: Integrating

individual and social creativity”, Internation Journal of

Human-Computer Studies Vol. 63 pp 482-512.

Gal, U., Yoo, Y. and Boland, R.J., 2004. “The Dynamics

of Boundary Objects, Social Infrastructures and Social

Identities” Sprouts: Working Papers on Information

Environments, Systems and Organizations, Volume

4(4) pp 193-206.

http://sprouts.case.edu/2004/040411.pdf

Gutwin, C. and Greenberg, S., 2001. “A Descriptive

Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time

Groupware”, Journal of Computer-Supported

Cooperative Work, 3(4), 411-446, 2002

Jennings, P., 2005. “Tangible Social Interfaces: Critical

Theory, Boundary Objects and Interdisciplinary

Design Methods”, proceedings of the 5

conference

on Creativity and Cognition, London UK, pp 176-186.

Latham, M., 1994. “Constructing the Team: Joint Review

of Procurement and Contractual Arrangements in the

United Kingdom Construction Industry“ HMSO,

London

Rezgui, Y., Cooper, G. Brandon, P. 1998. Information

Management in a Collaborative Multi-Actor

Environment, ASCE (American Society of Civil

Engineers) Computing in Civil Engineering, 12(3), pp.

136-145.

Rezgui, Y. 2007a. Exploring Virtual Team-Working

Effectiveness in the Construction Sector, Interacting

with Computers (Elsevier), 19(1), pp. 96-112.

Rezgui, Y. 2007b. Role-Based Service-Oriented

Implementation of a Virtual Enterprise: A Case Study

in the Construction Sector, Computers in Industry

(Elsevier), 58(1), pp. 74-86.

Star, S.L., 1989. “The structure of ill-structured solutions:

Boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed

problem solving”, in Readings in Distributed Artificial

Intelligence, M. Huhns & L. Gasser eds. Morgan

Kaufman, Menlo Park, CA.

Wenger, E., 1998. “Communities of practice: Learning as

a social system”, The Systems Thinker, 9(5).

Wetherill, M., Rezgui, Y., Lima, C. and Zarli, A., 2002.

“Knowledge Management For The Construction

Industry: The e-Cognos Project”, ITCon Vol. 7, pp

183-196

ICEIS 2008 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

106