| Abstract |
Groupware is software that is designed to support groups of people engaged in a task. As with single-user software, groupware mediates the users' interaction with a domain in pursuit of a goal, but when using groupware, the system also mediates the interactions users have with one another. In this dissertation, I will show that this aspect of groupware presents software developers with two opportunities that may be exploited when developing adaptive systems. The first opportunity concerns the knowledge acquisition problem. This opportunity presents itself because information that collaborators need to exchange so they can stay coordinated in their shared task will pass through the system itself. I will show that it is indeed possible to use this information, and that there is a repeatable technique for doing this that can be applied in other systems.
The second opportunity concerns how adaptive techniques may be applied once this information is attained. Because the system itself mediates all of the collaborators' interactions, the developer has the ability to “reach beyond” the software itself, and transform the collaborative process into one that is closer to a notional ideal. I call this adaptive mediation, and this approach represents a relatively novel application of adaptive technology. I will show that it is possible to use knowledge obtained by exploiting the first opportunity in order to transform a group's collaborative process as described.
These two opportunities are the focus of this dissertation, and my goal is to show that they exist, and that it is possible to take advantage of them. To do this, I present two case-studies. The first of these illustrates a solution to the knowledge acquisition problem in an adaptive groupware system. The second incorporates this solution, and uses the acquired knowledge to address a well-known problem that afflicts group information processing. Both case-studies successfully exploit the identified opportunities, and the second case study leads to some new techniques for and insights about group decision support. |