An Activity Awareness Visualization Approach Supporting Context Resumption in Collaboration Environments

In the research on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, activity awareness is considered a key feature for the coordination of users’ activities. We propose a model for the visualization of recent activity awareness information organized at two abstraction levels: (a) the upper level, represented as a tag cloud, provides a general view of the degree of activity occurred in the user’s collaborations. (b) the lower level is a detailed view of the occurred events, structured on the basis of the user’s activity contexts. The results of a user study show that the adoption of the proposed solution is preferable over a standard awareness space providing a direct access to complete awareness information.