The Social Web Cockpit integrates different services that have been developed in the Social Web research programme at GMD-FIT to support a knowledge sharing community. This includes a web-search based on recommendations, a concept index to develop a community vocabulary, shared workspaces for knowledge sharing, and an awareness service

Graether, W.

Prinz, W.

English

Gräther, W.

Fraunhofer-ePrints

The social web cockpit

AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)

Association for Information SystemsAIS Electronic Library (AISeL)ECIS 2000 Proceedings European Conference on Information Systems(ECIS)2000The Social Web CockpitW. PrinzSchloss BirlinghovenW. GraetherSchloss BirlinghovenFollow this and additional works at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2000This material is brought to you by the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been acceptedfor inclusion in ECIS 2000 Proceedings by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contactelibrary@aisnet.org.Recommended CitationPrinz, W. and Graether, W., "The Social Web Cockpit" (2000). ECIS 2000 Proceedings. 114.http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2000/114The Social Web CockpitW. Prinz, W. GrätherGMD-FITSchloß Birlinghoven53754 Sankt Augustin, GermanyAbstract- The Social Web Cockpit integrates different servicesthat have been developed in the Social Web researchprogramme at GMD-FIT to support a knowledge sharingcommunity. This includes a web-search based onrecommendations, a concept index to develop a communityvocabulary, shared workspaces for knowledge sharing, and anawareness service.I. INTRODCUTIONCSCW research yielded a number of groupware systems for thesupport of cooperative work such a shared document-spaces orworkspaces, shared applications, and workflow systems. Theseapplications support primarily work or knowledge sharing processesthat are pre-planned or that involve well-defined, closed, or smallgroups of people. This paper describes systems that aim at thesupport of knowledge sharing within larger and more looselycoupled groups of people that share a common interest, i.e.knowledge sharing communities. The presented systems originatefrom our “Social Web Research Program” at GMD-FIT which aimsto explore and demonstrate how we can turn informationenvironments into rich communication and interactionenvironments. These are:· BSCW, a Web-based shared workspace system [1];· Nessie, an application-independent awarenessinfrastructure [2];· Concept Index, a system for concept-based indexing ofWeb documents [3];· LiveMarks, a system of information processing softwareagents running on our agent platform SoaP [4].We have developed a service, called the "Social Web Cockpit",or "cockpit" for short, that integrates these service and that turnsWeb sites into meeting places where visitors may become aware ofeach other, open communication channels, and exchangeinformation and knowledge with each other or with experts. Usuallypeople visit a Web site in search of some information. So there issome chance that its visitors may have overlapping interests, if thesite matches their expectations, backgrounds, or motivations. Thesepersons might well profit from each other's knowledge by sharingopinions or experiences or offering advice. Some visitors mightenter long term relationships and eventually evolve a community –if only they became aware of each other. Similar functions areprovided by systems such as CoBrow [5] or ThirdVoice. The SocialWeb Cockpit goes beyond that. Visitors may enrich the web sitewith their knowledge by recommending pages and related links, byannotating and discussing them. People may add their owndocuments in a shared workspace, they may highlight key phrasesand develop their special terminology. These concepts and terms areautomatically cross-referenced with the site and related pages tosupport content-based navigation. Search facilities take into accountconcepts and collaborative ratings. Visitors may select pages fromthe site to be monitored for changes that will be indicated upon theirnext visit.We expect that web-sites that are augmented with the cockpit andthe Social Web Services may become very attractive for knowledgesharing communities because they offer the chance to meet again, tosee what is new, and to inspect the growing number of contributionsby its visitors. Eventually, the visitors may consider themselves as avirtual community that is held together by their common interestsand this special place for meeting and trading information andknowledge.Many Web sites would benefit from added community support:commercial sites that want to attract visitors, sites of professionalorganizations, self-help groups, clearing houses, digital libraries,project portals. Nowadays, however, community support is mostlyrestricted to chat, annotation and rating facilities, discussion forums,or forms to submit new links. The combination of a powerful sharedworkspace system, a collaborative recommendation service, acommunity vocabulary for knowledge organization, and anotification service, as offered in our Social Web cockpit, is unique.II. COCKPIT SERVICESThe cockpit is a small window that occupies only little space onscreen; all actions and controls can be dragged out in separate tinywindows. Therefore, most users don’t need to reorganize theirdesktop when using the cockpit (see figure 1). After the cockpit hasbeen launched and when a web-page is visited, a user becomesimmediately aware of other visitors and the communities at the site.A cockpit is a place for social encounters so users can get in contactwith each other using different communication tools. A chronologyof community visits supplies further details about the distribution ofvisits over the last hours, days, or month. This helps users to decideon the best time for visiting a community.The Social Web Cockpit uses BSCW to enable cooperation overthe Web. BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work) is a sharedworkspace system which supports document upload, eventnotification, group management, discussion forums, meetings, andFigure 1: Cockpit User Interfacemuch more. In the context of the Social Web Cockpit a communityis a group of people sharing similar interests and tasks. In ourapproach, the documents which the community collects andproduces are the main carrier of knowledge. Community knowledgeis stored in BSCW shared workspaces. Creation of communities andcommunity membership is implemented by BSCW functions.Users can rate the current page on a scale of 5 (poor, passable,fair, good, excellent). This personal rating is sent to the BSCWsystem, where it is added to other ratings of the page within thepresent community. The (changed) median of all ratings is returnedto the cockpit and displayed using the corresponding icon. Ratingsare used in LiveMarks to help users to retrieve useful informationfrom the Web.The Cockpit uses the NESSIE awareness infrastructure to turnweb sites into meeting places. Members of a community becomeaware of each other and get in touch. While visiting web pages,users get informed about the community to which the web pagebelongs. The median of all ratings of a web page - made bymembers of the community - is also shown. Users can easily contactexperts of this community. Awareness information is visualized bydifferent indicators; for example, changes of icons, detailed listingsof present members in a specific community, etc.Members of a community may easily start an agent whichmonitors web pages. The monitoring agent adjusts to the users'preferences: the user may specifiy what web page should bemonitored, for what keywords and at what dates and in whatfrequency this should be done. Users are notified of changes in aweb page by a little yellow asterisk in the monitor icon.The Social Web Cockpit uses the ConceptIndex system to enablemembers of a community to construct their own shared vocabulary.This vocabulary captures characteristic words and phrases; an indexbased on this vocabulary cross-references all web pages of thiscommunity. Web pages may be viewed with the communityvocabulary; phrases in the web page are highlighted and links to theindex are provided. A word or phrase can easily be added to thevocabulary. The index with all the cross-references is automaticallyupdated.The Cockpit uses a recommender system, which enablesmembers of a community to share queries and to collaborativelyretrieve and collect useful web pages. While a member of acommunity submits a query to a search engine, software agents inthe background look for similar queries of the community withrelated and recommended web pages. The result of the search is amixture of web pages originating from the recommender databaseand pages coming from the search engine. When the memberrecommends such a web pages (by rating it good or excellent), thepage is put into the link collection of this community.III. SUMMARY AND FURTHER WORKDifferent services developed by the Social Web ResearchProgramm are combined to provide a comprehensive set of servicesfor a knowledge sharing community. This includes a web-searchbased on recommendations, a concept index to develop acommunity vocabulary, shared workspaces for informationexchange, and an awareness service. We believe that the extensionof a web-site with these services will foster the community buildingprocess because it enables a web-site to become a meeting place fora knowledge sharing community.More information on the Social Web research programme, theCockpit, and the other projects can be found at:http://orgwis.gmd.de/projects/SocialWeb/.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSpecial thanks to the teams of BSCW, Concept Index,LiveMarks and Nessie of the FIT.CSCW research group whoall cooperated to make the Social Web Cockpit operationaland A. Voss who contributed to an earlier version of thisoverview.REFERENCES[1] Bentley, R., W. Appelt, U. Busbach, E. Hinrichs, D. Kerr,K. Sikkel, J. Trevor, and G. Woetzel (1997): BasicSupport for Cooperative Work on the World Wide Web,International Journal of Human-Computer Studies:Special Issue on Innovative Applications of the WorldWide Web 46, 6, pp. 827-846.[2] Prinz, W. (1999): NESSIE: An Awareness Environmentfor Cooperative Settings, in Proc. of ECSCW'99: SixthConference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work,Copenhagen, S. Bødker, M. Kyng, and K. Schmidt (eds.),Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 391-410.[3] Voss, A., K. Nakata and M. Juhnke (1999): ConceptIndexing, in Proc. of GROUP'99: International ACMSIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work,Phoenix, AZ, S. Hayne (eds.), ACM Press, pp. 1-10.[4] Voss, A. and T. Kreifelts (1997): Soap: Social AgentsProviding People with Useful Information, in Proc. ofGROUP'97: International ACM SIGGROUP Conferenceon Supporting Group Work, Phoenix, AZ, S. Hayne andW. Prinz (eds.), ACM Press, pp. 168-173.[5] Siedler, G., A. Scott and H. Wolf (1997): CollaborativeBrowsing in the World Wide Web, in Proc. of JENC8:8th Joint European Networking Conference, Edinburgh.

The Social Web Cockpit

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The Social Web Cockpit

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