A Generic System for Web-Based Group Interaction

The WWW has become the most important information system. But the demand of Web-based human interaction in a lot of situations, scenarios and applications e.g. electronic commerce and tele-learning, is still unsupported. Founding on a scenario-based requirements analysis we developed concepts, a client server architecture and a prototype of a basic group interaction system (gia-system). It currently supports user and group awareness, and communication facilities such as chat based either on dynamic group building or static acquaintance groups, and cooperative navigation. The gia-system, already evaluated within an electronic market place, is currently enhanced in two ways: First we investigate in more generic group building mechanisms than the existing location and acquaintance based one. Second we work on cooperation support for semistructured activities.