Summary

Funded by: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
From: 01/01/2009 until: 31/12/2012
Principal Investigator: González, Pascual 

Abstract

 This project aims to integrate different proposals within a same methodological framework in order to improve the development of collaborative systems in which activities regarding adaptation are basic to achieve a better usage of these systems. This project is conceived as the natural continuation of the previous CICYT project Web-based Adaptive and Collaborative Systems (ADACO) TIN2004-08000. The development of this project, among other things, has contributed to consolidate the collaboration among the researchers of the different universities, providing the basis for giving a guarantee to accomplish the current project in a successful way. 

The new methodological framework starts from some of the outcomes of the previous project, such as the definition of a first methodology in which the use of software models allows both the description of certain features regarding collaborative systems and the application of a process model based on usability engineering. These two main outcomes are the basic pillars from which we will start the definition of the new methodological framework.  This new framework is based on five working lines, which although they could be a priori considered independent, their integration within a same environment will greatly help to improve the development of collaborative systems, especially those systems including adaptive features. These five working lines in which we base the development of the project are the following: Quality models, patterns, architectures, adaptation and new interaction paradigms. 

It is important to highlight the necessity of completing the definition of a new quality model which allows us to describe accurately the concept of quality for this type of systems. Concretely, we aim to analyze especially a new concept related to “collaborative usability” that goes much further than the general concept of usability when talking about traditional interactive systems. Together with the experience gathered in the quality model, another way of gathering the experience based on patterns may help to achieve systems which fit better with the quality parameters defined in the previous model. 

On the one hand, the design of collaborative systems can be improved if we work from the definition of an adequate architecture that fits the specific needs that this kind of systems has, and that stimulate features such as extensibility, flexibility, portability, reusability, adaptation, evolution, reconfiguration, and so on. 

On the other hand, the complexity of this kind of systems due to the diversity of users that have to collaborate to accomplish complex tasks, among other things, makes particularly interesting the inclusion of especial techniques that ease the adaptation of the systems to the different contexts of use; contexts that nowadays are not only composed of user, platform, environment and task, but also incorporate the concept of group and its organization structure as an essential element to consider in the adaptation process. We have to take into account that the different adaptations will have to consider the new previously defined quality model as a reference. 

Lastly, these types of systems are especially suitable to apply new interaction paradigms, as they include particular features that greatly motive the application of these new paradigms. 

The final outcome of this project will be therefore the definition of a new methodological approach which integrates the developments carried out in the five working lines previously described with the main purpose of improving the quality of collaborative systems. We will start working from some of the results obtained in the previous project.