Is Group-Awareness Context-Awareness?

International audienceGroup awareness correspond to an important concept on Groupware applications, allowing individual users to be kept aware of group’s activities and status. Similarly, on Pervasive Computing, context is defined as any relevant information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity [7]. In this position paper, we advocate that group awareness information should be considered as context information and handled as such. Group awareness information is often employed for decision making, contributing to users’ activities and decisions. It represents also an important clue about user’s context, characterizing individual’s actions regarding the group. As such, group awareness may be used for adaptation purposes, adapting the system behavior, the supplied content or its services. To illustrate this point, we discuss the use of a context distribution system as a group awareness distribution mechanism