Proactive support for the organization of shared workspaces using activity patterns and content analysis

Shared workspace systems provide virtual places for self-organized and semi-structured cooperation between local and distributed team members. These cooperation systems have been adopted by a large community over the past years and the volume of managed information is increasing rapidly. However, a problem that occurs frequently is the missing user support for the workspace organization and a lack of assistance finding the right place for storing new documents and contributions. This often results in poorly organized workspaces, making it difficult to find documents. Starting with a user survey, this paper presents a solution that assists the users in finding the right location based on an analysis of recent individual and group activities combined with a content analysis of the shared workspaces. The evaluation of the system shows evidence that the combination of the two approaches provides a useful assistance for different work situations. Furthermore some unexpected effects could be observed that makes the solution also suitable for cooperative knowledge management.