Meeting others—supporting situation awareness on the WWW

Abstract World Wide Web (WWW) techniques provide a simple interface, which is accessible almost everywhere. The WWW supports document sharing and information retrieval, 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 concerns the user interaction on the WWW platform, and a theoretical framework, which is used in examining existing awareness support systems. Second, we provide an analysis of PeopleAwarenessEngine, which supports situation awareness and enables user communication and collaboration on the WWW.