HAYASHI Koichi, NOMURA Takahiko, HAZAMA Tan
Transactions of Information Processing Society of Japan, 40(11) 3977-3987, Nov, 1999 Peer-reviewed
In this paper we present a concept of awareness that supports collaboration based on an individual activity model. Conventional shared workspace systems provide virtual information space, where workers proceed their tasks, and provides workspace awareness to indicate who is doing what. We introduce a concept of activity awareness, which provides awareness for collaboration without employing shared workspaces. Activity awareness defines individual activity model for tracking activities, determining awareness scope as a structure of activities, and generating awareness information with in the scope. While workspace awareness only indicates events occurred in a shared space, activity awareness indicates perspectives and progress of tasks performed in worker's individual workspace. We further present an experimental result of Interlocus, a prototype system that adopts temporally threaded workspace as individual activity model, to show the activity awareness enables seamless supports of individual and collaborative work.