This article describes how the changing information about an individual's location, environment, and social situation can be used to initiate and facilitate people's interactions with one another, individually and in groups. Context-aware communication is contrasted with other forms of context-aware computing, and we characterize applications in terms of design decisions along two dimensions: the extent of autonomy in context sensing and the extent of autonomy in communication action. A number of context-aware communication applications from the research literature,are presented in five application categories. Finally, a number of issues related to the design of context-aware communication applications are presented.

In this chapter we seek to develop an understanding of the nature of presence in virtual environments from a real-world exploration of first, how presence is manifest in practice within virtual environments and second, the means by which everyday users experience virtual environments. The ethnographic study presented in this chapter is part of a multidisciplinary approach to the design of online large-scale collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) undertaken by the authors in a range of projects. Over the last few years a large number of systems to support online virtual worlds and CVEs have emerged. These include 3D environments: MASSIVE (Greenhalgh and Benford, 1995), DIVE (Dix, 1997), AlphaWorlds, Blaxxun, VWWW; 2D graphical systems: ThePalace; and textual environments: MUDs (Edwards, 1994).

Virtual environments present opportunities for novel interaction with and visualisation of abstract data. However, the inherent difficulties of rendering 3D environments, as well as bottlenecks in traditional virtual reality systems, make real-time manipulation of realistic amounts of data difficult. We present QSPACE, a data visualisation tool with which we have begun to explore techniques and architectures for making real-time interaction with largest amounts of data possible.

This article considers the importance of context in mobile systems. It considers a range of context-related issues and focus on location as a key issue for mobile systems. A design framework is described consisting of taxonomies of location, mobility, population, and device awareness. The design framework inorms the construction of a semantic model of space for mobile systems. The semantic model is reflected in a computational model built on a distriuted platform that allows contextual information to be shared across a number of mobile devices. The framework support the design of interactive mobile systems while the platform supports their rapid development.

As cooperative virtual environments have become more prominent as a means of allowing users to work together so has the need for users to understand the nature of these environments. This paper presents the development of a set of techniques to allow users to understand the properties of virtual environments as they move between different environments. The development of these techniques is informed by an ethnographic study of a multimedia art museum containing a wide range of different virtual environments.

This paper presents an infrastructure to support the dynamic sharing of information across a range of cooperative environments. The infrastructure builds upon the use of shared common spaces by using a distributed tuple space to provide information sharing at its base level. The platform extends existing considerations of tuple spaces by adding mechanisms to provide active support for sharing data elements. The use of a tuple space moves away from previous models of distribution in cooperative systems that focus on the propagation of events to focus on active data sharing. The use of data tuples allows the sharing of information to be independent of the information model allowing a wide range of applications and environments to be supported. The paper presents the infrastructure and shows how it can be used to support information sharing acrossanumber of different forms of cooperative system and application.

Article Free Access Share on Out of this world: an extensible session architecture for heterogeneous electronic landscapes Authors: Jonathan Trevor Department of Computing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancs. LA1 4YR, U.K. Department of Computing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancs. LA1 4YR, U.K.View Profile , Tom Rodden Department of Computing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancs. LA1 4YR, U.K. Department of Computing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancs. LA1 4YR, U.K.View Profile , Gareth Smith Department of Computing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancs. LA1 4YR, U.K. Department of Computing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancs. LA1 4YR, U.K.View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1998 Pages 119–128https://doi.org/10.1145/289444.289486Online:01 November 1998Publication History 1citation389DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations1Total Downloads389Last 12 Months4Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Despite the growth of interest in the field of CSCW,and the increasingly large number of systems whichhave been developed, it is still the case that fewsystems have been adopted for widespread use. This isparticularly true for widely-dispersed, cross-organisational working groups where problems ofheterogeneity in computing hardware and softwareenvironments inhibit the deployment of CSCWtechnologies. With a lightweight and extensibleclient-server architecture, client implementations forall popular computing platforms, and an existing userbase numbered in millions, the World Wide Web offersgreat potential in solving some of these problems toprovide an ’enabling technology‘ for CSCWapplications. We illustrate this potential using ourwork with the BSCW shared workspace system – anextension to the Web architecture which provides basicfacilities for collaborative information sharing fromunmodified Web browsers. We conclude that despitelimitations in the range of applications which can bedirectly supported, building on the strengths of theWeb can give significant benefits in easing thedevelopment and deployment of CSCW applications.

The World Wide Web is increasingly seen as an attractive technology for the deployment and evaluation of groupware However the underlying architecture of the Web is inherently stateless - best supporting asynchronous types of cooperation. This paper presents a toolkit for application developers, MetaWeb, which augments the Web with basic features which provide new and legacy applications with better support for synchronous cooperation. Using three simple abstractions, User, Location and Session, MetaWeb allows applications to be coupled as tightly or as loosely to the Web as desired The paper presents two distinct applications of MetaWeb, including the extension of an existing application, the BSCW shared workspace system, from which a number of observations are drawn.

The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web offers a great deal of potential in supporting cross-platform cooperative work within widely dispersed working groups. The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is attempting to realize this potential through development of web-based tools which provide cross-platform collaboration services to groups using existing web technologies. This paper describes one of these tools, theBSCW Shared Workspace system—a centralized cooperative application integrated with an unmodified web server and accessible from standard web browsers. The BSCW system supports cooperation through “shared workspaces”; small repositories in which users can upload documents, hold threaded discussions and obtain information on the previous activities of other users to coordinate their own work. The current version of the system is described in detail, including design choices resulting from use of the web as a cooperation platform and feedback from users following the release of a previous version of BSCW to the public domain.

The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web (W3) offers a great deal of potential for the developers of collaborative technologies, both as an enabling infrastructure and a platform for integration with existing end-user environments. This paper describes a system which attempts to exploit that potential by extending the W3 to provide a set of basic facilities for collaborative information sharing. The BSCW Shared Workspace system was conceived as an alternative to tools which currently support collaborative working for widely dispersed working groups such as electronic mail and ftp. We report on the design and implementation of our system, the problems we encountered, and the benefits accruing from our choice of the W3 as an enabling platform. Our experiences suggest how recent developments in the W3 point the way to more suitable and powerful mechanisms to support the development of collaborative systems.

This chapter has outlined the need to provide support for a range of systems based upon some notion of cooperative activity. Rather than adopt any single model of activity as a means of providing this support we have argued for a more neutral infrastructure which provides support which is sensitive to these applications. A core part of this approach is the separation between the domain semantics embodied with cooperative applications and the mechanisms supporting them. A new set of mechanisms based around the concept of an active workspace was presented. Workspaces allow the external effects of work to be represented in cooperative environments by recording the collecting together of people and resources. Active workspaces build upon this definition of a workspace by adding an externally available state and a set of templates to record activity dependencies. These mechanisms are intended to provide minimal lightweight support for activities with the policy information surrounding the intent of work recorded within applications. The use of workspaces to support a variety of different activity models was also presented with a brief discussion on an appropriate architecture to support active workspaces.

The World Wide Web (W3) is increasingly been seen as a platform for enabling remote access to new and existing applications from different client machines. While some applications have been deployed through specialised, proprietary W3 servers, the majority utilise the CGI interface provided by standard servers to provide all application functionality external to the server itself. Using experience gained in developing the BSCW Shared Workspace system, we argue that this “API-based” approach is both too restrictive and too “heavyweight” for the needs of many applications, which often require a small subset (or a different implementation) of the features the server offers. In contrast, we propose a more modular, component-based approach to enable applications for the World Wide Web, and present a prototype implementation of an integration toolkit which demonstrates this. As well as the potential for greater flexibility, performance and smaller application size, this approach also naturally extends to other methods of access and interaction such as electronic mail.

Article Free Access Share on Supporting collaborative learning during information searching Authors: Michael B. Twidale View Profile , David M. Nichols View Profile , Gareth Smith View Profile , Jonathan Trevor View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCL '95: The first international conference on Computer support for collaborative learningOctober 1995 Pages 367–370https://doi.org/10.3115/222020.222831Published:01 October 1995Publication History 8citation85DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads85Last 12 Months1Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

This paper examines the importance of providing effective management of sharing in cooperative systems and argues for a specialised service to support the cooperative aspects of information sharing. The relationship between features of the cooperative shared object service and existing services is briefly examined. A number of management services of particular importance to CSCW systems are identified. The paper presents a technique of realising a shared object service by augmenting existing object facilities to provide management of their cooperative use. These facilities are realised through object adapters that provide additional cooperative facilities and greater control over the supporting infrastructure.