A proposal of awareness services for the construction of quality community knowledge supported by the knowledge management system knowcat

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02556-3_42Procceedings of Symposium on Human Interface 2009, Held as Part of HCI International 2009, San Diego, CA, USA, July 19-24, 2009, Part IIt is well known that members of work groups need awareness about one another, about shared elements, and about the group process. We present a generic framework of awareness services for groupware systems. The proposed approach has been tested through the implementation of a prototype composed by several awareness services for the Knowledge Management system called KnowCat. KnowCat is a groupware that supports the collaborative construction of quality community knowledge. We carried out a research study with a group of students enrolled in a graduate course at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) to test our approach. The study outcomes corroborated that providing to the KnowCat users the most useful information about how the classmates have interacted with the system through the awareness services, can help them to know how they should solve their own work in the system and to be aware that they are working in a collaborative way.This research was partly funded by the Spanish National Plan of R+D, project number,TIN2008-02081/TIN; and by the AECI (Spanish Agency for the International Cooperation) project number A/017436/08