Enhanced multi-dimensional group communication model for collaborative applications / Norzilah Musa

A collaborative workspace consists of dynamically assembled groups of different skills and backgrounds. These dynamic groups share information collaboratively and communicate easily using various kinds of media, eventhough they do not share the same physical working environment. In line with that, various communication patterns such as sub-group, inter-group and intra-group are created so that users can involve with more than one group at the same time. This phenomenon contributes to the area of: formation of multidimensional communication activity. This is where, one dimension is defined as one group activity per user who shares one communication medium. Though communication is a central and important activity in any collaborative work, most collaborative applications are designed for a single dimension communication activity.This activity is a fixed and pre-defined communication media, which focuses on standard workflow routine and a planned agenda. Beside formal interactions, users are also engaged in unplanned and unstructured interactions. In addition, most programming languages either conventional or non-conventional, do not naturally support or manage multi-dimensional communication activities for any permutations internal group formation. As permutation group formation growth exponentially, the more complex of human-to-human or human-to-objects relationship. This multi-dimensional group communication needs to be coded as part of the system. As most applications do not support this kind of communication, users turn to back-channel interaction such as social media in order to discuss office issues. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the specification and design of the structured shared media for various purposes of communication activities in a single software platform. In particular, it addresses the problem of methods used in facilitating human-to-human communication in multiple group collaborative activities, which can be viewed as an instance of a multi-dimensional group communication problem.