A quantitative treatment to data from computer-supported collaboration: An ontological approach

Collaborative activity performed over specific platforms, designed for such purpose, can provide a deep knowledge about the roles, intentions and effects regarding participants and their interaction among themselves and with the knowledge objects available. This study aims at proposing a structured process for gathering the semantics of the activity hidden behind the raw data collected in log files from CSCL platforms. The proposal is based on exploring the semantic elements (activity awareness) through a social networks analysis (SNA). The main focus of our work is to match different behavioral profiles detected in the collaborative activity from CSCL with the formal profiles identified inside a complex concept-network. This network defines an ontology that describes the behavior expected when collaborating in different scenarios and types of activity. When a certain activity sequence matches with a predefined pattern, the concepts related to the pattern are then bound to the real activity sequence. © 2008 IEEE