A framework for supporting context-awareness for collaborative activities within organisations

Collaboration and innovation are frequently considered as essential elements of competitive organisations. These issues are targeted in this paper by describing a system for providing the user with context aware information about the dynamics of the organisational components. First described are five basic contextual types: location, time, entity, role, and knowledge. Then a simple context management framework is proposed that utilises these elements. Third, a virtual machine architecture is proposed to encapsulate applications and servers described within the above system. Specifically context aware services, components of the localised server, services delivery within virtual organisation, operating systems, and data layers are included in this virtual architecture. Virtualisation allows efficient management of software and hardware in general and provides means of easier replication of many facilities discussed here that are applicable to any organisation infrastructure. The proposed framework will be used as a base for the development of future collaborative virtual environments