Abstract
Dynamic environments characterize today’s world. In complex design and engineering processes, dynamic environments influence the requirements of an ongoing collaboration process. They lead to process goal changes or reduce the time available to achieve a collaborative goal. In such a case, collaboration support and processes need to be adapted. Various collaboration support systems assist groups by providing technological support to structure activities, generate and share data, and to improve group communication. However, current support systems often prescribe or assume a fixed process and a known group composition. As result, collaboration support is needed that considers the changing environment and provides groups with the support they need. Such support can range from a fixed process and tool configuration to an open collaboration environment that enables groups to interact in a self-organized way. This chapter introduces an elastic collaboration approach that comprises a continuum of collaboration support, ranging from prescribed collaboration to new emerging forms of collaboration. The chapter discusses how the concept of elastic collaboration can be implemented in an adaptive collaboration support system using a semantic model to capture, manage and analyze a collaboration environment. Based on this model, a sample application of the semantic model is presented along with a collaborative problem-solving model.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been partially supported by the FP7 EU Large-scale Integrating Project SMART VORTEX (Scalable Semantic Product Data Stream Management for Collaboration and Decision Making in Engineering) co-financed by the European Union. For more details, visit http://www.smartvortex.eu.
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Knoll, S.W., Janeiro, J., Lukosch, S.G., Kolfschoten, G.L. (2013). A Semantic Model for Adaptive Collaboration Support Systems. In: Hussein, T., Paulheim, H., Lukosch, S., Ziegler, J., Calvary, G. (eds) Semantic Models for Adaptive Interactive Systems. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5301-6_4
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