Awareness and the WWW

Abstract

The notion of awareness has received a lot of attention in the CSCW literature for quite some time now. Because it cannot be very precisely and uniquely defined, this notion covers a range of issues and is critical in very different situations. This is also true in the particular context of the WWW, where awareness has more than one facet. One objective for this paper is to give an overview of the field, by reviewing different awareness categories and by showing how they relate to Web-based systems. The discussion also gives an overview of the work done by the author in this area. Another goal for the paper is to introduce the papers presented at the CSCW'2000 Workshop on Awareness and the WWW with a short summary. ABSTRACTWith the increasing proliferation of chat applications on the Web, the old vision of "adding people" to the Web, is becoming a reality. While infrastructure seems to be scalable and stable enough to support collaboration, the user model is not well defined yet. In particular, there seems to be a certain lack of abstraction and granularity in existing solutions. This paper studies the current restrictions of two common concepts in collaboration on the Web, namely "people awareness" and "document awareness", and proposes a more general one that we call "collection awareness", which seems more adequate to the graph structure of the Web. We introduce a new medium for supporting this higher-level awareness: "Livemaps".

Foundations of unconstrained collaborative Web browsing with awareness

“…These issues are fundamental aspects of what has been called workspace awareness [18]. We suggest that the history of the navigation path in UCWSS provides what has happened before.…”

“…In particular, the trade-off between the requirements of individuals (emphasis on control) and the requirements of groups (emphasis on awareness) has been explored in the context of workspace navigation [12]. This group awareness [18] is catered for in our UCWSS by an application that will inform users when their session is part of a collaborative session, allowing them to disconnect or join at will. Even within a collaborative surfing session, users may chose to veto their visitation to a page from view by the rest of the group.…”

“…The third type of awareness is contextual awareness which relates to the application domain, rather than the users [18]. Here, we want to identify what content is interesting for the community.…”

“…Finally, we deal with the fourth type of awareness, peripheral awareness [18] by presenting our collective history as an optional display in the GUI that constitutes a browsing session and placing it away from the display of Web pages (like a tool-bar).…”

“…If fact, we believe that collaborative surfing demands awareness [18]. In simple terms, for the collaboration to be effective, participants must be aware of the involvement and participation of others.…”