Collaboration Awareness Exploration through Visual Analysis of Group Traces

The increasingly powerful browsers and smart devices provide more and more convenience for people's lives. At the same time, remote collaborative work can effectively reduce the cost of teamwork. Team members use various tools on the browser to quickly share information and coordinate tasks. As collaborative activities among members become more frequent, the traces produced by their interaction are rapidly growing. Although they are easily overlooked, they will subtly affect every member's understanding of group collaboration over time. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the group collaboration awareness though visual analysis of group traces. In this paper, three important classes of properties of trace that are necessary to describe the process of group collaboration are proposed and explained by detail. Besides, we present a group traces based visualization framework that can facilitate extracting insight from collaborative activities. For practical applications, the framework is applied and validated in the web-based collaborative working environment MCWE2.0.