On the Identification and Integration of Countermeasures to Cope with Data
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On the identification and integration of countermeasures to cope with data intensiveness in collaboration settings Manolis Tzagarakis Spyros Christodoulou Nikos Karacapilidis University of Patras & University of Patras & University of Patras & Computer Technology Institute Computer Technology Institute Computer Technology Institute and Press “Diophantus” and Press “Diophantus” and Press “Diophantus” 26504 Rio Patras, Greece 26504 Rio Patras, Greece 26504 Rio Patras, Greece [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT overwhelming that stakeholders are often at a loss to know This paper reports on an innovative approach that aims to even where to begin to make sense of it. “Big Data” [1] can facilitate and augment collaboration and decision making in negatively affect the effectiveness of decision making in an data-intensive and cognitively-complex settings. Towards organization [2] and create stress and cognitive overload to shaping our approach, we have first reviewed state-of-the- its stakeholders [3]. art Web 2.0 collaboration tools to identify cognitive overload issues that these tools are prone to and explore the In addition, this data may vary in terms of subjectivity and countermeasures they adopt to suppress data intensiveness. importance. Admittedly, it is nowadays easier to get the Exploiting this analysis, our approach minimizes the causes data in than out. The problems start when we want to of information overload by integrating appropriate consider and exploit the accumulated data and meaningfully countermeasures. The proposed solution brings together analyze them towards making a decision. Thus, in complex human and machine intelligence and enables an incremental settings, being able to pull only the relevant information formalization of the collaboration workspace. It and efficiently share, interpret and use this information for incorporates a set of interoperable services that reduce the decision making becomes a challenge when the right tools data-intensiveness and complexity overload to a and information systems are missing [4]. When things get manageable level, thus permitting stakeholders to be more complex, we need to identify, understand and exploit data productive and creative. patterns, aggregate large volumes of data from multiple sources, and then mine it for insights that would never Author Keywords emerge from manual inspection or analysis of any single Collaboration; decision making; sense making; data data source. In other words, the pathologies of “big data” integration; human intelligence; machine intelligence are primarily those of analysis. ACM Classification Keywords Generally speaking, information management related tasks K.4.3 Organizational Impacts: Computer-supported need to be streamlined and automated to make information collaborative work; H.4.2 Types of Systems: Decision work more productive. In the settings under consideration, support (e.g., MIS); H.5.3 Group and Organization the way that data will be structured for query and analysis, Interfaces: Computer-supported collaborative work. as well as the way that tools to handle them efficiently will be designed are of great importance and certainly set a big General Terms research challenge. Overall, such innovative solutions have Design; Experimentation; Human Factors; Performance. to face two major imperatives: (i) they need to exploit the information growth by ensuring a flexible, adaptable and INTRODUCTION scalable information and computation infrastructure; new Information overload is a major problem in today’s approaches, taking advantage of distributed computing and organizations. While incoming data is rapidly increasing, clusters of computational resources, are needed for making sense and filtering what is important for the structured and unstructured data search, data pre- problem in hand becomes more and more difficult and time processing, database analytics, resource pooling, and consuming. In many cases, the raw information is so storage optimization [1]; (ii) they need to exploit the competences of all stakeholders and information workers to Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for meaningfully confront various information management personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are issues [5], such as information characterization, not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies classification, presentation, retention, storage, disposal etc.; bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, in other words, dealing with data-intensive and cognitively or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. complex settings is not a technical problem alone. CSCW’12, February 11–15, 2012, Seattle, Washington, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1086-4/12/02...$10.00. To deal with this complex problem in contemporary collapsing/expanding of user selected parts of the map, collaboration and decision making settings, we first “tagging” on a topic’s visualization by using a number of attempted to devise a roadmap of features to be specific icons (“tags”), zooming in/out on a large map, the incorporated in the suggested solution; towards this, we history of a mind map, the filtering tool to isolate part of the reviewed representative Web 2.0 collaborative tools. The map by using various criteria and the search tool. Bubbl.us purpose of our review was twofold: (i) to identify a number (http://www.bubbl.us/) provides a zoom in/out tool which of issues that may cause information overload in the may be efficiently used to help browsing and scrolling in settings under consideration, and (ii) to explore the maps that include many bubbles. Coediting of maps is also countermeasures each tool adopts to suppress the effects of possible resulting in sharing maps among the members of a information overload. Based on this review and adopting group of users. XMind (http://www.xmind.net/) supports a current technology advancements, we shaped an innovative filtering mechanism (by selecting “markers” or “labels”). approach that exploits the synergy of human and machine The extending/collapsing feature of the subtopics of a topic reasoning to facilitate collaboration and decision making in may also be useful when dealing with maps containing a the settings under consideration. The proposed solution is large number of topics. Boundaries are used as a topic being developed in the context of an FP7 EU project, aggregation mechanism to which info concerning the state namely Dicode (http://dicode-project.eu/). of the topic can be attached. File sharing tools enable the distribution and facilitate CURRENT APPROACHES The emergence of the Web 2.0 era introduced a plethora of access of digital information in the form of files. collaboration tools which provide engagement at a massive Collaborative editing tools (that permit the joint authoring scale and feature novel paradigms. In an attempt to identify of documents via individual contributions), such as wikis, state-of-the-art functionalities that aim at dealing effectively also fall in this category. Popular tools include Dropbox, with data-intensive situations in collaboration and decision Humyo, Box.net, Google Docs, MediaWiki, Confluence making settings, we briefly review in this section some and PbWorks. DropBox (http://www.dropbox.com/) representative Web 2.0 tools. In this paper, what we are handles information overload issues by providing version particularly interested in is not the features of the tools per history, file recovery, online list to all events having taken se, but rather their functionalities designed to cope with place and awareness mechanisms. Humyo.com data-intensive situations. Based on this fact and the (http://www.humyo.com/) provides online teamspaces and extensive list of causes and countermeasures against a filtering mechanism. Box.net (http://www.box.net/) offers information overload reported in the work of Eppler and document versioning, file and folder tagging and filtering Mengis [6], we analyze collaboration tools categories mechanisms. Google Docs (http:// docs.google.com/) according to the sources of cognitive overload and the supports history revision, searching, sorting based on file countermeasures taken by each tool. By the term ‘source of type and tagging for all saved documents. MediaWiki cognitive overload’ we refer to the characteristics of (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) provides information that may lead to cognitive overload situations awareness features (watchlists), page history, versioning in each tool, while by ‘countermeasures’ to the solutions and access control mechanisms, hierarchical organization of that the tools make available to remedy cognitive overload. the Wiki pages and a search mechanism. Confluence (http://www.atlassian.com/software/ confluence/) supports Web 2.0 tools overview notifications, separate spaces, access control mechanism, Classified upon their basic purpose, Web 2.0 tools deal with page categorization and tagging, searching and a mind mapping, file sharing and collaborative editing, social notification mechanism to avoid information overloading. networking, note taking and annotation, project/task PBworks (http://pbworks.com/) enhances Wiki versioning management, and argumentative collaboration. and notifications, page tagging, workspace exporting (to a zip file) and a keyword-based search mechanism. Mind mapping tools permit