An ontological approach to automating collaboration and interaction analysis in groupware systems

Collaboration and interaction analysis is a research area that investigates how to characterise group work carried out by users of groupware systems. This paper describes an ontological framework that conceptualises the collaborative activity supported by groupware systems and the underlying collaboration and interaction analysis processes. Thus, two main ontologies are proposed: the collaborative work ontology and the collaboration and interaction analysis ontology. The ontological framework has been used to derive model-based computational support in order to allow developers to create, by generating and instantiating models, a collaboration and interaction analysis system to be integrated into a groupware system. The analysis ontologies and framework are used in a case study in which users collaborate, in groups, to build UML Use Cases diagrams using a groupware modelling tool.

► We conceptualise the collaboration and interaction analysis process in groupware. ► An ontological framework has been built to conceptualise these analysis process. ► The framework includes tools to model the analysis in each collaborative process. ► The framework allows the automatic execution of the modelled analysis. ► The features of the framework are illustrated with a case study.