Joel E. Fischer Identifying, Visualizing and Supporting Social Networks for Collaborative Work in a CSCW-System December 17, 2007 Selbststaendigkeitserklaerung Hiermit erkl¨areich, dass ich die vorliegende Masterarbeit selbstst¨andigund nur unter Verwendung der angegebenen Literatur und Hilfsmittel angefertigt habe. Ort, Datum und Unterschrift Danksagung Ich m¨ochte meine Dankbarkeit all denen ausdr¨ucken, die diese Masterarbeit m¨oglich gemacht haben. Zu allererst m¨ochte ich meinem Betreuer Peter Mam- brey am Fraunhofer Institut f¨urAngewandte Informationstechnik danken, der mich in mehr als drei Jahren gemeinsamer Arbeit an seinen Erfahrungen hat teilhaben lassen, durch den mir Einblicke in dieses interessante Forschungs- feld m¨oglich waren, der mich immer wieder ermutigt hat, mich in Projekar- beit zu beteiligen, die das ¨ubliche Maß studentischer Hilfskr¨afte¨uberschreitet. Ohne seinen Horizont, seine Erfahrungen und reichhaltigen Gespr¨ache und Anmerkungen zu meinem Thema w¨arediese Arbeit so nicht m¨oglich gewesen. Kein geringerer Dank gilt meinem Betreuer Wolfgang Prinz, der mir im- mer wieder wertvolle Anmerkungen zu meiner Arbeit, insbesondere zu der technischen Realisierung gab, der mich immer wieder auf verwandte aktuelle Arbeiten im Forschungsbereich aufmerksam machte und mich stets motivierte und ermutigte. Ich danke auch den Kollegen der Forschungsgruppe CSCW am Fraunhofer FIT f¨urfruchtbare Diskussionen, Hinweise und aufmunternde Worte. Insbesondere danke ich Rudolf Ruland, dessen Expertise und Hilfe mir bei der Integration in BSCW sehr geholfen hat. Dankbar bin ich Alistair Hampshire f¨ur das Korrekturlesen der Arbeit. Großer Dank gilt meinen Eltern, Christine Ewert und Wolfram Fischer und meiner restlichen Familie f¨urdie Unterst¨utzungjeglicher Art in meiner Studienzeit. Ohne ihre Unterst¨utzungh¨atteich mich nicht so auf Studium und die Abschlussarbeit konzentrieren k¨onnen. Ich bin meiner Freundin Daniela sehr dankbar f¨urihre Geduld, Verst¨andnis und R¨ucksichtnahme in der Zeit des Schreibens. Sie hat mich auch in schweren Zeiten immer wieder motiviert, stets zu mir gehalten und mir Kraft geschenkt. Joel Ewert Fischer Duisburg, im Dezember 2007 Contents Part I Foundations 1 Introduction ............................................... 3 1.1 Problem Definition and Objectives . 4 1.2 Structure of the Thesis . 5 2 Background ............................................... 7 2.1 Knowledge, Learning and Activities in Socio-Technical Systems 7 2.1.1 Knowledge and Knowledge Management . 8 2.1.2 Groups and Social Cognition . 9 2.1.3 Theory of Social Practice and Communities . 10 2.1.4 Activities and Challenges of Cooperative Teamwork . 12 2.2 Basic Concepts of CSCW . 16 2.2.1 Groupware . 17 2.2.2 Awareness . 21 2.2.3 Information Visualization . 28 2.3 Social Network Analysis . 32 3 Related Work ............................................. 35 3.1 Social Network Visualization . 35 3.2 Visualizing Awareness Information . 37 Part II Development of a BSCW Add-On to Visualize Underlying Social Networks 4 The Development Approach ............................... 41 4.1 Used Technology . 43 4.2 Graph Visualization Frameworks . 44 4.2.1 HyperGraph . 44 4.2.2 Java Universal Network/Graph Framework . 45 X Contents 5 Empirical Requirements Analysis .......................... 51 5.1 Research Design . 51 5.1.1 Research Questions . 51 5.1.2 Methods . 52 5.1.3 Population/Sample . 54 5.2 Results . 55 5.3 Interpretation of the Results . 57 5.4 Critical Assessment of the Requirements Analysis . 58 6 Concept and Design of the Visualization Tool . 61 6.1 Scenario . 62 6.2 Design of a User-Artefact Network for BSCW . 63 6.2.1 Definition of the User-Artefact Network . 64 6.2.2 Visual Properties of a User-Artefact Network . 65 6.2.3 Interaction with the Visualization . 66 6.3 Discovering Mediated Interpersonal Networks . 68 6.3.1 Types of Working Relations . 68 6.3.2 Degree of Working Relations . 69 6.3.3 Topology of the Mediated Interpersonal Network . 71 6.3.4 Extracting the Mediated Interpersonal Network . 71 6.3.5 Inferring Common Interest . 72 7 Specification of the Prototype ............................. 75 7.1 Extending BSCW with packages . 75 7.2 Starting Point: The package \Readers" . 75 7.3 GraphXML format as interface . 76 7.4 Parsing the GraphXML data . 78 7.4.1 Event-Oriented vs. Tree-Oriented XML parsing . 78 7.4.2 Custom GraphXML Parser . 79 7.5 The visualization applet . 81 7.5.1 Force-directed layout: The Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm . 83 7.5.2 The renderer . 83 7.5.3 The drawing area: VisualizationViewer . 84 7.5.4 Chronological Workspace . 84 7.5.5 Mediated Interpersonal Network . 87 7.6 Summary . 91 8 Evaluation ................................................. 93 8.1 Evaluation Approaches and Level of Analysis . 94 8.2 Research Questions and Success Criteria. 94 8.2.1 Usability Questions . 96 8.3 Method of Evaluation . 97 8.3.1 Ethnographic Expert Interviews . 97 8.4 Findings . 98 Contents XI 8.4.1 Locating and initializing the tool . 98 8.4.2 Initial Interpretation of the Visualization . 98 8.4.3 User Expectations . 101 8.4.4 Functionality Exploration and Think Aloud . 103 8.4.5 Revealing Use Cases . 107 8.5 Summary . 109 9 Conclusions ................................................111 10 Outlook ...................................................113 Appendix A ...................................................115 Appendix B ...................................................121 References .....................................................125 List of Figures 2.1 Activities of cooperative work with the goals to achieve common ground and activity awarenes. Adopted from Neale et al. [2004, pg. 115] . 14 2.2 Cooperative framework with communication through the artefact. Adopted from Dix et al. [2003, pg. 699] . 19 2.3 The BSCW user inteface . 20 2.4 Awareness visualization in a 3D-world in DocuDrama, an extension to BSCW. Adopted from [Sch¨aferet al., 2003] . 31 2.5 SmartMaps visualize awareness information. Adopted from [Gr¨atherand Prinz, 2003] . 32 3.1 The interface of the EventMap visualized in a HyperGraph applet. 37 3.2 The SWAPit System view of the EU research project EcoSpace workspace.. 38 4.1 The Development Process. Phases of Design and Methods used. 42 4.2 An example of a visualization created by the Java Applet\Readers" on the test server. The picture shows the creator of the document and its readers. 45 4.3 A network visualized with JUNG. The shortest path between the nodes w and a are is highlighted. Screenshot produced from examples available at http://jung.sourceforge.net/applet. 46 4.4 The type hierarchy for graphs (adopted from [O'Madadhain et al., 2005, pg. 9]). 48 5.1 The demography of the sample of the requirements analysis. 54 5.2 Interpolated means with a confidence interval of 95% for each group. 55 5.3 Comprehensiveness of the questions asked in the requirements analysis. 59 XIV List of Figures 6.1 Use of awareness functionality to enhance different types of awareness. 62 6.2 Use of awareness functionality to control collaboration among peers. 64 6.3 A bipartite relationship: user bscw-admin has created a document hypergraph 378.xml that user user2 has read. 69 6.4 The process of extracting a subset of connectected users. 72 6.5 The mediated interpersonal network with tool tip. 73 6.6 Common Interest Indices for a selected user. 74 7.1 Class diagram of the custom GraphXML parser.. 80 7.2 Class diagram of the main applet class. 82 7.3 Filtering mechanism for edges in comparison to vertices.. 86 8.1 The user-artefact network of interviewee No. 3 as layed out by the visualization. Most connected nodes are emphasized, the interviewee is highlighted in yellow in the network. 99 8.2 The user artefact network of interviewee No. 1. The interviewee himself is highlighted in yellow in the network. 100 8.3 The user-artefact network of interviewee No. 2. The interviewee himself is highlighted in yellow in the network. Read events have been filtered out. 101 8.4 The Java Swing interaction components of the visualization tool's UI. 102 8.5 The Personal Network of the chosen workspace of interviewee No. 2. 105 10.1 Future work: SNA-techniques enhanced with a semantic document repository. 114 Part I Foundations 1 Introduction Throughout the past decades, the diminishment of the primary and secondary sector of the economy in the so-called developed economies went hand in hand with the growth of the tertiary sector1, often alongside with the localization of this development in a post-industrial or information society. The activities in tertiary sector such as finance, technology and services are characterized by knowledge-intense and information dependent processes. With the advent of technical communication networks such as the internet, the possibilities for transmitting information to support knowledge-intense work arose. As today's work practices become increasingly fragmented and specialized, as organizations grow to span geographic distances, the support of work by means of Information- and Communication Technologies (ICT) has become a crucial and inseperable practice. Due to these developments, a field that aims at supporting cooperative work by means.