Modelling dynamic group behaviours

Abstract

New technological challenges provoke continuous improvements in society, and thus, change the very conception of the world around us. Nowadays, communication and collaboration activities play an important role in the modern work organisation. The CSCW paradigm is a promising technology offering group support, but its success depends on the way in which real group organisation is captured. We propose a model to represent, describe and integrate the complex behaviour of groups in a suitable manner. After a review of the state of art, a conceptual framework to address the problem domain is presented, and a formalism is introduced by extending Unified Modelling Language (UML) notation to model foundations and peculiarities of groups. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.