A proposal of awareness services for the construction of quality community knowledge supported by the knowledge management system knowcat

Abstract

It is well known that members of work groups need awareness about one another, about shared elements, and about the group process. We present a generic framework of awareness services for groupware systems. The proposed approach has been tested through the implementation of a prototype composed by several awareness services for the Knowledge Management system called KnowCat. KnowCat is a groupware that supports the collaborative construction of quality community knowledge. We carried out a research study with a group of students enrolled in a graduate course at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) to test our approach. The study outcomes corroborated that providing to the KnowCat users the most useful information about how the classmates have interacted with the system through the awareness services, can help them to know how they should solve their own work in the system and to be aware that they are working in a collaborative way. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.