An infrastructure for supporting ubiquitous awareness.

摘要

Coordination is an important issue in the performance of work. This is especially a problem for work that is done in isolation from coworkers (people are in different offices, buildings and even continents. There is less awareness of what coworkers are doing, and coordinating with those coworkers becomes problematic. There are a variety of awareness tools designed to bridge the gap between people by carrying awareness information between members of such work groups. Such tools suffer from two types of problems. First, they either lack diversity in the types of awareness information that they can carry, or lack detailed awareness information from the sources that they can access (referred to as the detail-variety trade-off). Either way, much relevant awareness information does not get sent to coworkers. Second, these tools are rarely interchangeable; awareness tools are generally designed to work with only a single source or set of sources of awareness information. Users need to be able to select an awareness tool that presents the awareness information in a manner consistent with their work environment, their role within their work environment and their personal work practices. This need can only be supported by letting awareness tools be interchangeable, requiring that many awareness tools be able to access many sources of awareness information.; To address this problem, we have provided an infrastructure for supporting ubiquitous asynchronous awareness. The Cross Application Subscription Service Strategy (CASS Strategy) is a strategy for building these types of infrastructures. This strategy has been implemented, and its ability to eliminate two key weaknesses of awareness tools is demonstrated. In so doing, we have greatly simplified the task of future researchers and developers in the field of collaborative awareness, as they can now worry exclusively about new techniques either for presenting awareness information to users, or for obtaining new sources of awareness information, and do not have to build entire client server systems from scratch.