A Conceptual Framework for Modeling Awareness Mechanisms in Collaborative Systems

Awareness is defined as the perception of the activities being carried out by members of a team in a given context. The use of awareness support techniques reduces the effort needed to realize communicative and collaborative tasks. Therefore, this leads to an increase in group work productivity. In this article we propose a conceptual framework which improves upon the process of building interactive collaborative systems as proposed by CIAM (a methodological framework for designing interactive applications for group work) by taking the dimension of awareness into consideration.