MANAGING ACTIVITY DYNAMICS OF WEB BASED COLLABORATIVE APPLICATIONS

Abstract

The World Wide Web has been widely accepted as a viable communication infrastructure to support collaborative activities on computer networks. While cooperating objects of different roles can easily and freely communicate knowledge on the web, the web site managers/developers must write programs to manage the communication behavior in collaborative activities. However, the current hypertext model for the web concentrates on the static structure of hypertext. Few conceptual specifications are capable of effectively integrating the hypertext model with activity dynamics to clarify the dynamic interaction and constraints of desired collaborative activities on the web. Furthermore, decision-makers must observe communication behavior on the web to adapt collaborative activities. Although web servers register each web access in a web log, up to now, only a few query or report mechanisms have been available to obtain required information from the web log. This study presents a specification to capture the static and dynamic structure of intended collaborative activities, and a query mechanism to obtain required information from the web log. The specification and query mechanism make it possible to construct a web site that will provide group activity space and flexibly interpret roles, encourage individuals to commit to responsibilities, and enable activities to be observed.