Application-based context-awareness in collaborative workspaces: A review

In this paper, we investigate the existing research based on context-awareness elements in various collaborative applications. The investigation is based on seven context awareness entities; application, media, method, tool, platform, framework and device. This work focuses on the application which involves eight context elements; domain, activity of user, context object, locations, type of communication, type of context, digital elements and models. In order to define the attributes for each of the context element, various domains of applications are selected that include education, business, mobile, multimedia and virtual reality. Based on the attributes, a context awareness structure in collaborative workspaces is proposed. The structure visualizes a general relationship between the clustered elements in handling context awareness. Thus, the relationship enables context-awareness to be used in a broader perspective of context-aware applications as opposed to the current practice that is limited for specific circumstances.