Title: A ubiquitous, semantic based virtual shared environment for collaborative virtual work groups

Authors: Rosa Alarcon, David A. Fuller

Addresses: Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Departamento de Ciencia de la Computacion, Vicuna Mackenna 4860, 6904411, Santiago, Chile. ' Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Departamento de Ciencia de la Computacion, Vicuna Mackenna 4860, 6904411, Santiago, Chile

Abstract: Collaborative Virtual Work Groups (CVWG) are small groups of people that work together but are distanced geographically, temporarily or organisationally, keeping their connections through technologies like groupware. Groupware enables a shared environment for CVWG and informs its state and changes through a mechanism called Awareness. When Awareness notifies users about changes automatically, it can overload users. We argue that the relevance of these changes can be inferred from the semantics of user actions taking into consideration an interpretation context (work context) and the state of users when being notified (user context). This approach allows us to control and deliver notifications ubiquitously and to encapsulate this behavior in an awareness server so that classic groupware applications can be adapted to benefit from this behavior. The mechanism is a Multi-Agent System (MAS) with a rule-based reasoning approach. We briefly discuss the experience we obtained when building applications over this mechanism.

Keywords: awareness; collaborative systems; context-aware applications; intelligent agents; personal assistants.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2004.004069

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2004 Vol.19 No.3/4, pp.209 - 214

Published online: 10 May 2004 *

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