Context-dependent notification management for awareness support in collaborative environments

The online management of activities has obvious advantages, such as the immediate and ubiquitous access to resources and the possibility of interacting with co-workers, friends, etc., by means of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. For instance, a document sharing service can be used to carry out collaborative editing work; a Web calendar can be used to provide other people with information about one’s schedules and commitments; an Instant Messaging application, or an e-mail tool, can be used to interact with other people either synchronously or asynchronously. However, each application works in isolation, without sharing any information with the remaining business services. Moreover, each application separately manages the user’s workspaces and collaboration contexts, offering a partial view on the state of such contexts, focused on the types of activity it is devoted to. Thus, in order to be aware of what is happening around, the user is in charge of inspecting such workspaces and merging them into a unified view which abstracts from the various application-oriented views. In order to address this issue, we propose an awareness support tool, which enables the holistic management of awareness information across services, plus a personalized reception of information, reflecting the user’s interests. This tool implements a mediation layer between the user and the business services; it manages a unified view of the user’s workspaces, abstracting from the application-oriented views offered by individual business services. The development of this type of tool is challenging: even though users need to be informed about what happens around them (e.g., which operations have been performed by their collaborators), many researchers agree on the fact that there is a trade-off between informing and interrupting people with notifications. In fact, interruptions can have a disruptive effect on users’ emotional and attentional state; e.g., see (Bailey et al., 2000; 2001) for a discussion on this topic.