EVALUATING DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS FROM A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE

This paper presents the evaluation of distributed and collaborative systems from the knowledge point of view, the most important asset of these kinds of systems. The paper analyses the quality characteristics of distributed collaborative systems and proposes a metric to evaluate the aspects of knowledge management process.distributed systems, collaborative systems, knowledge management

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning

Learning and teaching resource are available on the Web - both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors). They can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate Social information retrieval (SIR) methods, techniques and systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance in potentially overwhelming variety of choices. The aim of the SIRTEL’09 workshop is to look onward beyond recent achievements to discuss specific topics, emerging research issues, new trends and endeavors in SIR for TEL. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to present, and more importantly, to discuss the current status of research in SIR and TEL and its implications for science and teaching

Supporting collaborative work using interactive tabletop

PhD ThesisCollaborative working is a key of success for organisations. People work together around tables at work, home, school, and coffee shops. With the explosion of the internet and computer systems, there are a variety of tools to support collaboration in groups, such as groupware, and tools that support online meetings. However, in the case of co-located meetings and face-to-face situations, facial expressions, body language, and the verbal communications have significant influence on the group decision making process. Often people have a natural preference for traditional pen-and-paper-based decision support solutions in such situations. Thus, it is a challenge to implement tools that rely advanced technological interfaces, such as interactive multi-touch tabletops, to support collaborative work. This thesis proposes a novel tabletop application to support group work and investigates the effectiveness and usability of the proposed system. The requirements for the developed system are based on a review of previous literature and also on requirements elicited from potential users. The innovative aspect of our system is that it allows the use of personal devices that allow some level of privacy for the participants in the group work. We expect that the personal devices may contribute to the effectiveness of the use of tabletops to support collaborative work. We chose for the purpose of evaluation experiment the collaborative development of mind maps by groups, which has been investigated earlier as a representative form of collaborative work. Two controlled laboratory experiments were designed to examine the usability features and associated emotional attitudes for the tabletop mind map application in comparison with the conventional pen-and-paper approach in the context of collaborative work. The evaluation clearly indicates that the combination of the tabletop and personal devices support and encourage multiple people working collaboratively. The comparison of the associated emotional attitudes indicates that the interactive tabletop facilitates the active involvement of participants in the group decision making significantly more than the use of the pen-and-paper conditions. The work reported here contributes significantly to our understanding of the usability and effectiveness of interactive tabletop applications in the context of supporting of collaborative work.The Royal Thai governmen

Congenial Web Search : A Conceptual Framework for Personalized, Collaborative, and Social Peer-to-Peer Retrieval

Traditional information retrieval methods fail to address the fact that information consumption and production are social activities. Most Web search engines do not consider the social-cultural environment of users' information needs and the collaboration between users. This dissertation addresses a new search paradigm for Web information retrieval denoted as Congenial Web Search. It emphasizes personalization, collaboration, and socialization methods in order to improve effectiveness. The client-server architecture of Web search engines only allows the consumption of information. A peer-to-peer system architecture has been developed in this research to improve information seeking. Each user is involved in an interactive process to produce meta-information. Based on a personalization strategy on each peer, the user is supported to give explicit feedback for relevant documents. His information need is expressed by a query that is stored in a Peer Search Memory. On one hand, query-document associations are incorporated in a personalized ranking method for repeated information needs. The performance is shown in a known-item retrieval setting. On the other hand, explicit feedback of each user is useful to discover collaborative information needs. A new method for a controlled grouping of query terms, links, and users was developed to maintain Virtual Knowledge Communities. The quality of this grouping represents the effectiveness of grouped terms and links. Both strategies, personalization and collaboration, tackle the problem of a missing socialization among searchers. Finally, a concept for integrated information seeking was developed. This incorporates an integrated representation to improve effectiveness of information retrieval and information filtering. An integrated information retrieval process explores a virtual search network of Peer Search Memories in order to accomplish a reputation-based ranking. In addition, the community structure is considered by an integrated information filtering process. Both concepts have been evaluated and shown to have a better performance than traditional techniques. The methods presented in this dissertation offer the potential towards more transparency, and control of Web search

A First Step to Formally Evaluate Collaborative Work

We present an initial attempt to formally evaluate performance measures related to CSCW applications. In particular, we study the relations between the quality of the output, the number of people and time spent on the overall task and the total work done. We introduce a novel application to illustrate our ideas: collaborative retrieval. We propose a specific heuristic to the case when many people search for the same information, thereby increasing the recall and precision of the answer. We apply our evaluation methodology to this case. Keywords: CSCW, quantitative evaluation, collaborative retrieval. Introduction The introduction of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) tools within an organization can have a variety of positive outcomes [1]. Generally speaking, those benefits can be classified into three broad categories. The first type of benefits of CSCW introduction refers to an improved quality of the end product. Better documents, designs or decisions may be the result of..

INVESTIGATING SEARCH PROCESSES IN COLLABORATIVE EXPLORATORY WEB SEARCH

People are often engaged in collaboration in workplaces or daily life due to the complexity of tasks. In the information seeking and retrieval environment, the task can be as simple as fact-finding or a known-item search, or as complex as exploratory search. Given the complex nature of the information needs, exploratory searches may require the collaboration among multiple people who share the same search goal. For instance, students may work together to search for information in a collaborative course project; friends may search together while planning a vacation. There are demands for collaborative search systems that could support this new format of search (Morris, 2013). Despite the recognized importance of understanding search process for designing successful search system (Bates, 1990; M. Hearst, 2009), it is particularly difficult to study collaborative search process because of the complex interactions involved. In this dissertation, I propose and demonstrate a framework of investigating search processes in the collaborative exploratory search. I designed a laboratory-based user study to collect the data, compared two search conditions: individual search and collaborative search as well as two task types through the study. I first applied a novel Hidden Markov Model approach to analyze the search states in the collaborative search process, the results of which provide a holistic picture of the collaborative search process. I then investigated two important components in the collaborative search process – query behaviors and communications. The findings reveal the characteristics of query and communication patterns in the collaborative search. It also suggests that although the collaboration between two people on search did not achieve a higher performance than two individuals, the collaboration indeed make people feel more satisfied with their performance and less stressed. The results of this study not only provide implications for designing effective collaborative search systems, but also show valuable research directions and methodologies for other researchers