The rich person-to-person interaction afforded by shared physical workspaces allows people to maintain up-to-the minute knowledge about others ’ interaction with the workspace. This knowledge is workspace awareness, part of the glue that allows groups to collaborate effectively. In real-time groupware systems that provide a shared virtual workspace, the possibilities for interaction are impoverished when compared with physical workspaces, partly because support for workspace awareness has not generally been a priority in groupware design. In this paper, we present the concept of workspace awareness as one key to supporting the richness evident in face-to-face interaction. We construct a conceptual framework that describes the elements and mechanisms of workspace awareness, and then show several widgets that can be embedded in relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware systems to support the maintenance of workspace awareness.

Software development remains mentally challenging despite the continual advancement of training, techniques, and tools. Because completely automating software development is currently impossible, it makes sense to seriously consider how tools can improve the mental activities of developers apart from automating them away. Such mental assistance can be called “cognitive support”. Understanding and developing cognitive support in software engineering tools is an important research issue but, unfortunately, at the moment our theoretical foundations for it are inadequately developed. Furthermore, much of the relevant research has occurred outside of the software engineering community, and is therefore not easily available to the researchers who typically develop software engineering tools. Tool evaluation, comparison, and development are consequently impaired. The present work introduces a theoretical framework intended to seed further systematic study of cognitive support in the field of software engineering tools. This theoretical framework, called RODS, imports ideas and methods from a field of cognitive science called “distributed cognition”. The crucial concept in RODS is that cognitive support can be understood and explained in terms of the computational advantages that are conferred when cognition is redistributed between software developer and their tools and environment. The name RODS, in fact, comes from the

DOCUMENT MODEL Gentler separates page content, page design, document structure as well as several quality control and authoring issues. Conceivably, these components of document design might be handled by di#erent people, with di#erent skills. Regardless, since these components are separated, the viscosity of authoring is greatly reduced.

Many efforts have been made to exploit the properties of graphical notations to support argument construction and communication. In the context of design rationale capture, we are interested in graphical argumentation structures as cognitive tools to support individual and collaborative design in real time. This context of use requires a detailed understanding of how a new representational structure integrates into the cognitive and discursive flow of design, that is, whether it provides supportive or intrusive structure. This paper presents a use-oriented analysis of a graphical argumentation notation (QOC). Through a series of empirical studies, we show that it provides most support when elaborating poorly understood design spaces, but is a distraction when evaluating well constrained design spaces. This is explained in terms of the cognitive compatibility between argumentative reasoning and the demands of different modes of designing. We then provide an account based the collaborative affordances of QOC in group design meetings, and extend this to discuss the evolution of QOC argumentation from short term working memory to long term group memory.

This article develops a model of organizational knowledge acquisition in terms of modern psychological, sociological, economic and management theories by deconstructing the terms involved: an organization as a collective agent having goals and capabilities to achieve them; knowledge as the hidden state variables imputed to an agent as the basis of its capabilities; and acquisition as the reproduction of dispositions. This form of model enables one to relate the knowledge processes involved to existing models of organizational processes, and to understand such phenomena as knowledge economics and knowledge management. The breadth of the notion of organization encompasses markets, firms and societies; the operational definition of knowledge clarifies its role and the utility of the notion; and the focus on reproduction of dispositions in knowledge acquisition enables the management of knowledge acquisition to be analyzed. ______________________________________________________________________________________ 1.

: The development of knowledge-based systems involves the management of a diversity of knowledge sources, computing resources and system users, often geographically distributed. The knowledge acquisition, modeling and representation communities have developed a wide range of tools relevant to the development and management of large-scale knowledge-based systems, but the majority of these tools run on individual workstations and use specialist data formats making system integration and knowledge interchange very problematic. However, widespread access to the Internet has led to a new era of distributed client-server computing. In particular, the introduction of support for forms on World Wide Web in late 1993 has provided an easily programmable, cross-platform graphic user interface that has become widely used in innovative interactive systems. This article reports on the development of open architecture knowledge management tools operating through the web to support knowledge acquisiti...

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL), launched in December 2002, is emerging as a center of innovation in digital libraries as applied to education. As a part of this extensive project, the GetSmart system was created to apply knowledge management techniques in a learning environment. The design of the system is based on an analysis of learning theory and the information search process. Its key notion is the integration of search tools and curriculum support with concept mapping. More than 100 students at the University of Arizona and Virginia Tech used the system in the fall of 2002. A database of more than one thousand student-prepared concept maps has been collected with more than forty thousand relationships expressed in semantic, graphical, node-link representations. Preliminary analysis of the collected data is revealing interesting knowledge representation patterns.

The Visual Semantic Web (ViSWeb) paradigm enhances human accessibility to the current Semantic Web technology by enabling the visualization of knowledge. Arguing against the claim that humans and machines need to look at different knowledge representation formats, Object-Process Methodology (OPM) is shown to enable modeling of systems in a single graphic and textual model. ViSWeb provides for representation of knowledge over the Web in a unified way that caters to humans as well as machines. ViSWeb is developed as an OPM-based layer on top of XML/RDF/OWL to express knowledge visually and in natural language. Both the graphic and the textual representations are strictly equivalent. Being intuitive yet formal, they are not only understandable to humans, but are also amenable to computer processing. The advantages of the ViSWeb approach include equivalent graphic-text knowledge representation, visual navigability, semantic sentence interpretation, specification of system dynamics, and complexity management. The ability to use such bimodal knowledge representation that is both human understandable and machine processable is

In many areas of work, large amounts of information accumulate. Ways to store and access this information have been the subject of much research for the last century and even earlier. The advent of computers has greatly extended the possibilites for information retrieval. However the situation is still not an ideal one; many problems still exist. Many of the problems associated with current multimedia and hypermedia information systems can be addressed by adapting the well-established thesaurus technique. By using media matching and processing technology, textual terms can be supplemented with representations of other media types. This thesis describes such a multimedia thesaurus and the ways in which it can be used. Traditional thesaurus information retrieval techniques are explored along with existing systems research with similar aims. The textual thesaurus paradigm is extended to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge representation research, allowing artificial intelligence an...

Cognitive support in knowledge engineering is a growing concern, and information visualization is a useful means to address this. We identify some requirements for tools offering cognitive support, and present a tool, Jambalaya, which addresses some of these concerns. We identify some of its features and describe areas we are actively improving. 1.