How a structured document model can support awareness in collaborative authoring

Although awareness is important in collaboration, user studies have shown that many groupware tools fail to meet user requirements or expectations in this respect. We show how richer documents models can lead to richer forms of awareness and present a general awareness framework based on a metamodel for structured documents and associated metrics. We describe how the framework was used to extend a collaborative authoring system to provide awareness information at variable levels of granularity according to user requirements. We also discuss how the framework could be used with other forms of collaborative tools.