Integrating Awareness Sources in Heterogeneous Collaboration Environments

Collaboration in heterogeneous environments involves dealing with variety of information sources that generate information that users need to be aware of. Users must be empowered to tailor the quality of awareness information. Heterogeneity of sources and media adversely affects the quality of group awareness. We propose a solution in terms of integrating the sources at the information level and provide a model for the same. We discuss our progress in designing the model, its utility and benefits. We believe that such a unifying framework can increase the effectiveness of group awareness in supporting coordination and execution of collaborative work.