Awareness Services (AS)
Awareness services consist of two parts: one of them provides Real-time functionalities integrated in KP-environment and the second one is implemented within KP-Lab platform and provides features for saving log of events performed in KP-environment and its integrated parts. These logs are used e.g. for support of scheduled notification and will be used as one major source of data for KP-Lab Analytical tools.
Description of the service
Awareness services are designed primary to support users collaboration in virtual environment and in advanced level interact with KP-Lab Analytical tools. AS provide several features to ensure collaborators know about the activities of others in order to coordinate their work, support their collaboration, identify potential problems and prevent conflicts and misunderstandings. For example: status information about each user, present and past actions of a user, interaction between users and between users and environment, etc. AS were implemented as two part system: Real-time workspace awareness (RTA) and Log based (History and Participation) awareness (LBA).
- RTA is a synchronous functionality to follow the user’s activity in real-time for collaborative purposes such as presence notification, user’s action notification, artefacts (collaborative objects, e.g. document, task, wiki page, etc.) use notification based on pop-up approach. RTA provides information of presence and current activities of users e.g. by indicating who is on-line, what activities users are involved in at the moment (e.g. who is working on which artefacts and processes). This part of the AS has been designed and developed under Metropolia responsibility.
- LBA is an asynchronous functionality (designed and implemented by TUK) that builds on persistent storage of events representing activities performed by users in KP-environment or integrated tools. List of logged events can be found here. Based on this data LBA supports scheduled notification as well as several types of analytical tools as visual statistical analysis, various types of knowledge creation processes analysis (e.g. visual analyzer, timeline-based analysis, identification and evaluation of user-defined patterns, and data export tool). Interaction with analytical tools is specified in deliverable D5.6 that will be published also for public on this page
Prospective users
All users of the KP-environment may profit very much for availability of Awareness services integrated into it. Information provided by AS can be used for educational and research purposes too.
LBA services are implemented as stand-alone Java library that provides its interfaces and services in integration manner.
The tool and knowledge creation
Awareness service provides features to support realisation and evaluation of knowledge creation processes. It serves as a major data (events, users annotations of activities) provider into Analytical tool, which will support different types of analyses.
Knowledge protection
HPA is open source software designed and developed by TUK. It is licensed under a GNU Lesser General Public License 3.0.
Contact details
Jozef Wagner (TUK) - Jozef.Wagner@gmail.com
Frantisek Babic (TUK) - Frantisek.Babic@tuke.sk
Jan Paralic (TUK) - Jan.Paralic@tuke.sk
