Abstract

Collaboration is a social and interactive process, where participants join efforts toward a group goal. A Group Support System (GSS) can improve the productivity of collaborative work by structuring activities and improving communication. By using context-based adaptive techniques, a GSS can support facilitation of the participants by offering appropriate tools for a certain activity in a specific context. In this paper we present ongoing research about a supporting framework for a semantic GSS that supports efficient collaborative work. Drawing on Collaboration Engineering, the paper explores the use of an ontology to capture and share process information that define the collaboration context. As a result, we present an approach of a collaboration ontology that subdivides the collaboration context into the individual context of a participant and the collaborative context of a group. Researchers can use the ontology to develop context-based adaptive techniques that support collaborative work using GSS.