Is Group-Awareness Context-Awareness?

Abstract

This article discusses the interest of emerging a unified view for group awareness and context information on groupware and context-aware systems. Group awareness corresponds to an important concept on Groupware applications, allowing individual users to be kept aware of group's activities and status. Context is defined by ubiquitous computing as any relevant information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. We assume that group awareness information should be considered as context information and handled as such. Group awareness information is often employed for decision making, contributing to users' activities and decisions, but it gives also an important clue about user's context, characterizing individual's actions regarding the group. As such, group awareness may be used for adaptation purposes, adapting the system behavior, the supplied content or its services. Besides, architectural concerns adopted on context-aware system should also be considered when developing new groupware applications that are more and more designed as context-aware systems.