The Social Web Cockpit: Assistant for Teams and Communities
By Wolfgang Prinz, Wolfgang Gräther, Fraunhofer FIT – September 12, 2002
This article describes the design and functionality of the Social Web Cockpit, an assistant that supports users in teams and communities. The cockpit provides social awareness and supports collaboration, notification of interesting Web pages, collaborative construction of community knowledge, and the development of a community vocabulary. The cockpit aims at turning the World Wide Web from an interaction medium into a cooperation tool, for the active support and self-organization of virtual communities.
Introduction
CSCW research has yielded a number of groupware systems for the support of cooperative work, such as shared document-spaces or workspaces, shared applications, and workflow systems. These applications support primarily work processes that are pre-planned or that involve well-defined, closed, or small groups of people. This article describes the "Social Web Cockpit", or "cockpit" for short, that aims at the support of "virtual communities", i.e. often loosely coupled groups of people sharing a common interest or task. The cockpit is a result from our "Social Web Research Program" at Fraunhofer FIT which aims to explore and demonstrate how we can turn information environments into rich communication and interaction environments.
A community of users should be enabled to structure and filter the Web according to their needs, based on opinions, recommendations, and personal relations. For example, visitors may enrich the Web site with their knowledge by recommending Web pages and related links, or by annotating and discussing them. People may also add their own documents in shared workspaces, they may highlight key phrases and begin to reach a common understanding by involving new concepts. These concepts should be automatically cross-referenced with the site and related Web pages to support content-based navigation. Search facilities should take into account concepts and collaborative ratings. Visitors may select pages from the site to be monitored for changes that will be indicated upon their next visit.
We expect that Web sites that are augmented with such services may become very attractive because they offer the chance to meet again, to see what is new, and to inspect the growing number of contributions by its visitors. Eventually, the visitors may consider themselves as a virtual community that is held together by their common interests and this special place for meeting and trading information and knowledge. Such assistance can be compared with a cooperatively developed and mobile portal that dynamically evolves through use within a community.
Many Web sites would benefit from added community support: commercial sites that want to attract visitors or want to manage customer relations, sites of professional organizations, self-help groups, clearing houses, digital libraries, project portals. Nowadays, however, community support is mostly restricted to a dedicated site that offers chat, annotation and rating facilities, discussion forums, or forms to submit new links. In contrast, the cockpit provides an assistant and companion that is not bound to a single site. This allows users to stay in touch with and to contribute to the community on the fly while traveling the Web. The cockpit becomes a place for social encounters so users can get in contact with each other using different communication tools. The combination of a powerful shared workspace system, an awareness service, a collaborative recommendation service, and a community vocabulary for knowledge management, as offered in our Social Web Cockpit, is unique.
Cockpit Functionality
Communities, in the context of the cockpit, are groups of people sharing a common interest or task and interacting electronically. The people are called members of a community. Each community has a name and owns a collection of information collaboratively acquired and shared by its members.
The cockpit provides simple but effective means for the creation of communities and the management of community membership. There are three classes of accessibility regarding community membership:
- moderated communities, i.e. communities where only one or more selected members are allowed to add other persons or remove members,
- standard communities, i.e. communities where all members are allowed to add other persons or remove members, and
- anonymous communities, i.e. communities that are anonymously accessible. Membership is not required.
Accessibility and modification of the pool of common documents shared by a community is analogous to the classes of community membership. One can think of an additional combination: class 1 for community membership, but class 2 for accessing shared community documents.
If a Web page is currently not in the pool of common documents of a community, then the user can immediately add this Web page to a community of her/his choice. For this operation community access rights are obeyed.
Figure 1: User interface of the Social Web Cockpit
In its current version the cockpit itself is a small window that occupies only a little space on the computer screen; all actions and controls can be dragged out in separate tiny windows. Therefore, most users don't need to reorganize their desktop when using the cockpit. The standard configuration consists of a browser window and the cockpit window on the screen. Currently we are working on an integration of the cockpit functionality into Internet Explorer.
Figure 2: Functions for Web pages
After the cockpit has been launched, whenever a Web page is visited that belongs to a community where the user is a member, the user becomes immediately aware of the name of the community and of other visitors to the page.
The cockpit is a companion for the World Wide Web. When visiting Web sites, users get informed about the presence of others and get notified about some characteristics of the Web site. In contrast to other tools with similar functionality, the cockpit offers all services at all Web sites.
For the following we assume, that a Web page currently visited belongs to a community named 'Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)'. We assume also, that the user is a member of this community. First, the user gets informed, that this Web page belongs to this community. The name is shown in the title bar of the cockpit window or in the iconified window of the cockpit.
Graphical symbols indicate the presence of others. Rightmost in the cockpit's window the number of persons in the community and their maximum number (number of members) as well as the number of cockpit users is shown. In our case there are 5 of 10 users visiting Web pages of this community and 21 persons are currently using the cockpit. In addition, a list of all currently present members of the community can be obtained using the menu "visits" and the submenu "currently present." This information can be used to call (chat, Netmeeting, ...) other visitors or to directly move to a different, probably more often visited, Web site. A chronology of community visits supplies further details about the distribution of visits over the last hours, days, or month. This helps users to decide on the best time for visiting a community.
Each community has one distinguished member, the expert, by default its creator. For Web sites or pages, however, there may be experts, too. The presence of an expert for the Web site or the community is directly indicated, and if the expert is present the cockpit users can call and communicate with her/him. As an example tool for communication with experts we are currently using Netmeeting, i.e. a function is offered that is comparable with a call center where one can get in touch with a specialist for a Web site.
Figure 3: Monitoring, rating and communication
The awareness functions described so far are concerned with presence of other people. In addition, the cockpit offers a means for creating personalized awareness about changes of Web sites. For a Web site users can start an agent which monitors this Web site periodically. Monitoring is carried out within a given frequency and at given time intervals, for example, every hour from Monday to Friday and from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. The user can set both, frequency and time intervals. The agent checks for page updates and if requested the presence of user-defined keywords. If the agent succeeds, then the user is informed by a change of the monitor icon of the user interface. Not only the user is informed but also all other members of the community according to their given preferences. This functionality is provided through the TOWER infrastructure. Authorized users can register their interest in events generated by the cockpit agent and will then be automatically informed by their preferred media, even when they are not currently using the cockpit.
The median of the collaborative rating of the currently visited Web page is presented in the cockpit's user interface by a symbolic representation. For the rating there are five symbols representing the values poor, passable, fair, good, and excellent. The indication of the rating is a further important awareness function, i.e. users are informed at a glance about the quality of the Web page as assessed by members of the community.
Although the use of the Internet and the World Wide Web is widespread, not all users have their own Web site. As a solution to this problem, the cockpit offers so-called shared workspaces. For each community there exists an associated shared workspace which is named "documents." Documents of any type can be put into this workspace. In this way, community members are enabled to create a collection of common documents. An even more important shared workspace of each community is named "link collection." This workspace contains only links to Web pages, collected collaboratively by the members of the community. Both collections are realized as BSCW shared workspaces and can be accessed through buttons in the user interface of the cockpit. The content of the collections is shown in an extra browser window. These collections enable members of communities to present their own documents on the Web without having to be able to create Web documents.
Figure 4: Accessing information collections
All documents in a community can be rated using the corresponding cockpit function. There are five discrete values available: poor, passable, fair, good and excellent. Note, that the mode of this function is also collaborative, i.e. a common rating is calculated as the median of all ratings. Each member of a community can make only one rating. The median is directly shown in the user interface of the cockpit. However, individual ratings can also be inspected, and the documents of the shared workspaces can be sorted according to the rating values. This function enables groups to develop a common estimation of information. Imagine, for example, a team of co-located persons collecting information for a survey of the state of the art of WAP.
For a community, it is not sufficient to collaboratively collect documents; it is also necessary to reach a common understanding. The ConceptIndex service of the cockpit enables members to create their own vocabulary. Each vocabulary belongs to the Web pages in the link collection of a community. A vocabulary consists of concepts, i.e. words and phrases, that are important and characteristic for these Web pages. Adding a concept to a vocabulary is like dragging a marker over text on a paper document. The user selects the word or phrase with the mouse and chooses to add this concept to the vocabulary. In addition, the new concept can stand in different relations to other concepts: synonym, sub-concept, enclosing concept.
The vocabulary of a community can be used during browsing the Web: when a Web page is visited all matching concepts of the vocabulary are superimposed with a special color to highlight them. This feature provides a first estimate of whether a Web page is relevant for a community and worth collecting. Note that ConceptIndex uses word stemming of words as well as exact matching for the matching of concepts to words in documents.
The ConceptIndex service maintains an index with cross-references of the concepts in the vocabulary to the Web pages in the link collection of a community. This cross-reference enables users to navigate in the link collection using the concepts. The cross-reference is automatically updated when a concept is added, modified, or removed.
Scenario
A student is using the cockpit and browsing the Web. He is interested in information about SAP-related information. The cockpit indicates that the currently visited Web page belongs to a community named classroom7 and that the rating of the Web page is excellent. He is curious about the person who has added this Web page to the community. Therefore, he calls the cockpit function which pops up the link collection in an extra browser window. It was Mary Smith. He also inspects all ratings of this Web site and recognizes that another student has given the rating poor. He knows her and calls a cockpit function to check if she is present so he can discuss with her online the reason for such a divergent rating.
Unfortunately she is not present, so he chooses the cockpit function to display the Web page superimposed with the concepts of the vocabulary. Suddenly he comes across an interesting hint about SAP best-practice reports. Up to now there are no other Web sites concerning prices in the link collection. He submits a query for LiveMarks and gets a few recommended Web sites. The most interesting one is a Web site which is not in the link collection. He recommends it, rating it good, and it is automatically added to the link collection. In addition he extends the vocabulary by concepts he detected on this Web site. The information gathering was very successful and he extends his report with a chapter about pricing. Finally, this document is uploaded to the documents of the community.
Even this short scenario shows assistance provided by the cockpit: the interaction with the Web is supported, Web sites are enriched with background information, Web sites can be viewed and structured differently, and social orientation of users is made easy.
Conclusion
Berners-Lee's vision for the World Wide Web was the support of cooperation through shared knowledge. This requires the development of Web-based cooperation support tools that enable a social and qualitative orientation within a community and its information base. The cockpit integrates different systems to support these aspects. Social orientation is supported by the combination of the TOWER awareness service with a rating and recommendation service. The latter combined with the ConceptIndex system support the collaborative construction of a shared terminology which enables a qualitative orientation.
The cockpit facilitates new forms of support for virtual communities. So far most systems provide a central community site that needs to be visited by the users to get in touch with the community. In contrast the cockpit offers a community service to its users at any place in the Web. It recognizes community relevant places, points the user to other community members and supports the structuring, extension, and rating of community-relevant information. It turns the Web from an information medium into a cooperation tool, for the active support and self-organization of communities.
