Towards a Platform-Independent Event Management Model for Web Collaboration

Web collaboration provides virtual work teams with the capability to collaborate via the Internet. Web collaboration is fully supported by a large range of Web-based tools, such as text chats and discussion forums as well as document repositories, to assist in the three main areas of collaboration, namely coordination, cooperation, communication, with communication being the base for reaching coordination and cooperation. In this context, awareness is essential for any of these three areas due to its positive impact in on-line collaborative work in terms of group motivation, interaction, or problem-solving abilities. Indeed, awareness allows for implicit coordination of collaborative work, opportunities for informal, spontaneous communication and gives users the necessary feedback about what is happening in the system. On the other hand, Web collaboration environments are characterized by a high degree of user-user and user-system interaction thus generating a huge amount of action events. The management of action events and its constant notification to the collaboration is a key issue since the analysis of data gathered from real on-line work groups may help enhance important issues in group functioning and collaborative work process to be understood. In this paper, we first discuss on the main elements and issues involved in knowledge management and awareness to support online work teams during Web collaboration. Then, we propose a generic and exhaustive platform-independent event model for Web collaboration to meet different event notification needs as well as providing extensibility and reuse capabilities.