Meeting others - supporting situation awareness on the WWW

World Wide Web (WWW) techniques provide a simple interface, which is access ible almost everywhere. The WWW supports document sharing and information r etrieval, but has no tools for direct user interaction, simply because the mechanisms to support user awareness are missing. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present general concepts of situation awareness, which c oncerns the user interaction on the WWW platform, and a theoretical framewo rk, which is used in examining existing awareness support systems. Second, we provide an analysis of PeopleAwarenessEngine, which supports situation a wareness and enables user communication and collaboration on the WWW. (C) 2 001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.