Extending a Shared Workspace Environment with Context-Based Adaptations

Nowadays, many teams collaborate via shared workspace environment which offer a suite of services supporting the group interaction. The needs for an effective group interaction vary over time and are dependent of the current problem and group goal. An ideal shared workspace environment has to take this into account and offer means for tailoring the offered the services to meet the current needs of the collaborating team. Current approaches barely offer means for manual tailoring which is difficult. Context-based adaptation mechanisms can be used to support teams with shared workspace environments best meeting their needs. In this article, we propose a service-oriented architecture of shared workspaces, analyze this architecture to identify adaptation possibilities, introduce the Context and Adaptation Framework (CAF) as a means to extend shared workspace environment for context-based adaptations and validate our approach by reporting on our prototype implementation.