Suitable notification intensity: the dynamic awareness system

Being aware of others' activities has played a vital role in the success of online collaboration. This resulted in the emergence of many groupware systems that provide users with information about the activities of their collaborators in various manners. In virtually all current groupware systems, users are often overburdened by large amounts of unnecessary activity information. This happens because users are most of the time only interested in certain pieces of information for limited durations, while presently there exist no efficient mechanisms for automatically following a user's focus and adjusting the information flow directed at her/him. In this paper we present as a practical solution to this critical problem the dynamic awareness system, which extends the functionality of the BSCW shared workspace system. Key element of the dynamic awareness system is its rule-based inference mechanism to adjust the notification intensity, which reduces the information overload and indirectly allows users to better keep track of relevant events, as well as to manage more efficiently large amounts of shared information. We tested the effectiveness of the dynamic awareness system under real-life circumstances and describe the evaluation results.