Defining Tasks, Domains and Conversational Acts in CSCW Systems: the SPACE-DESIGN Case Study

Most of the current academic and professional work requires collaboration between the members of a working group. Groupware tools play a prevailing role in supporting this collaborative work, often from different locations and at the same time. The research field of CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) studies how to design effective groupware tools. To increase their potential, groupware systems must be flexible and have the capacity to adapt themselves to multiple tasks and situations. In order to provide answers to these challenges, in this article we propose the use of meta-models and XML-based languages to specify the most important characteristics of a groupware modeling system, such as the application domain, the requirements of the tasks to be carried out, how communication takes place and the regulation of the shared workspace. These models and techniques have been used to develop a specific groupware system called SPACE- ESIGN (SPecification and Automatic Construction of collaborative Environments of DESIGN), a CSCW tool with support for synchronous distributed collaborative work that adapts and re-configures itself as a result of processing the domain specification, the task, the communication and the system working norms.