inContext: On coupling and sharing context for collaborative teams

Present team members have difficulties in keeping the relations between their various, concurrent activities due to the lack of suitable tools supporting context coupling and sharing. Furthermore, collaboration services are hardly aware of related context of team members and their activities. Such awareness is required to adapt to the dynamics of collaborative teams. In this paper, we discuss the context coupling techniques provided by the inContext project. Utilizing the concept of activity-based context and Web services techniques, we can couple individual and team contexts at runtime, thus improving the context-awareness and adaptation of collaboration services such as email, shared calendars, instant messaging and document management.