Supporting adaptation intelligibility, control, evaluation and adaptation policy evolution in a context-based adaptive collaboration environment

摘要: Nowadays knowledge-intensive collaborative work is performed by distributed teams of end-users. Collaboration Environments (CEs) enable such collaborative work by providing a variety of affordances, ie, through applications, processes and artifacts. These affordances need to be continuously adjusted in order to support the needs of end-users in emergent collaboration situations. A context-based adaptive shared workspace CE automatically adjusts its affordances based on context representation and adaptation knowledge. Such an automatic adaptation poses challenges for the end-users: they may not notice an adaptation, or may not be able to understand the cause and effect of the adaptation. Also, since no system is perfect, an adaptation may not fit the needs of the end-users in a collaboration situation. Therefore, an end-user affected by the adaptation may feel the need to make an exception from the adaptation. Another affected end-user may be happy with the original adaptation and may not understand the exception. This may lead to a social conflict among the affected end-users. Since an Adaptation Policy translates the team’s agreed-upon collaboration strategies into the adaptation of the CE, the end-users can best evaluate the quality of the adaptation in-situ. Moreover, the end-users, after evaluating the adaptation, may feel the need to modify/delete an erroneous Adaptation Policy or to define a new Adaptation Policy. This thesis takes the end-users’ viewpoint on context-based adaptation of a shared workspace CE. It identifies four research problems to be solved. The research problems are adaptation intelligibility, end-users …