Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
because the information may occupy the greater part of the screen. It is required
filtering the information not much related with a user who receives the information.
To control awareness information, a system must handle the contents or
semantics of the awareness information and the information about relationship
among users. Thus, awareness information model that enables handling contents
or semantics of the information and represents relationship among users is required.
Processing awareness information.
Not only controlling but processing awareness
information will be required by a system supporting the non-WYSIWIS principle.
We propose grouping, taking statistics, and abstraction as typical processing
methods. To realize such processing, the representation of awareness information
should be easy to deal with.
Grouping
is used as a method of generating awareness
information of groups. For example, when some groups work concurrently, users
may want awareness information that indicates a status of each group roughly
estimated instead of the information about each user. The system summarizes
each attribute of awareness information about each user and shows the summarized
information in a precise manner. Ordinarily, awareness information provides
current
statuses of users. In contrast to this,
statistical awareness information
summarizes a sequence of awareness information of objects (users or groups) from
the past to now. The system needs to have a kind of history buffer for storing
awareness information.
Abstraction
is also a method of ensuring security or privacy
of users. This method extracts only necessary information from source awareness
information and shows the extracted information in an abstract way. For example,
a system extracts an activity of a user from video and audio data and shows the
activity as a kind of symbolic characters representing the user. It controls the degree
of exposure of awareness information so that undesirable information will be
suppressed.
The principal usage of awareness information will be classified into two types:
identifying characteristics of individual users and comparing characteristics among
users. To support the latter usage, it is required to normalize awareness information
for comparison. It will be achieved by applying methods described above.
3.4.2
Examples
We developed several tools providing awareness information based on the notion
discussed above. Selected example tools are presented here.
Shared Pointer.
Figure 3 shows the screen of a prototype system of VIEW
Classroom, a distance learning system which have been developed in our
laboratory
22)
. Shared pointers are used in the window on the upper left side of the
screen. The shared pointer can indicate explicit awareness information, such as a
role or a name of a user with a text string, his/her activity with a color of the
pointer. Each user has different pointer sharing status. Figure 3 represents a screen
of a student (Iwamoto). The status of pointer sharing is shown in
Pointer Sharing
