Awareness Supporting Technologies used in Collaborative Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Since the establishment of Computer Supported Collaborative Work as a research area, computer advances have change the paradigm of how technology is applied to improve the performance in collaborative scenarios. Notifications are an important part of this improvement. Technological systems have been applied in order to provide collaborators with the sufficient awareness to keep a task going. In this paper we present the protocol and results of a Systematic Literature Review that delves in the application of new technologies to provide awareness in collaborative systems. Moreover, we classify the collaborative systems found in literature using two traditional taxonomies for CSCW in order to understand which notification mechanisms are used to support which systems. Our review covers the last 10 years and classifies system prototypes based on the context in which they are applied, the notification and information gathering mechanism used, and the assessment performed. With over 400 papers reviewed, 83 that met the review requirements were included. The review results show that traditional interfaces and mobile devices are still the most common notification mechanisms. However, ubiquitous devices and non-traditional interfaces have also been used.