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Abstract: The research described in this article estimated the relative incidence of protocols invalidated by linguistic incompetence, inattentiveness, and intentional misrepresentation in Web-based versus paper-and-pencil personality measures. Estimates of protocol invalidity were derived from a sample of 23,994 protocols produced by individuals who completed an on-line version of the 300-item IPIP representation of the NEO-PI-R (). Approximately 3.8% of the protocols were judged to be products of repeat participants, many of whom apparently resubmitted after changing some of their answers. Among non-duplicate protocols, about 3.5% came from individuals who apparently selected a response option repeatedly without reading the item, compared to .9% in a sample of paper-and-pencil protocols. The missing response rate was 1.2%, which is 2–10 times higher than the rate found in several samples of paper-and-pencil inventories of comparable length. Two measures of response consistency indicated that perhaps 1% of the protocols were invalid due to linguistic incompetence or inattentive responding, but that Web participants were as consistent as individuals responding to a paper-and-pencil inventory. Inconsistency did not affect factorial structure and was found to be related positively to neuroticism and negatively to openness to experience. Intentional misrepresentation was not studied directly, but arguments for a low incidence of misrepresentation are presented. Methods for preventing, detecting, and handling invalid response patterns are discussed. Suggested for future research are studies that assess the moderating effects of linguistic incompetence, inattentiveness, and intentional misrepresentation on agreement between self-report and acquaintance judgments about personality. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The World Wide Web, today's largest and most important online information infrastructure, does not support 3D content and, although various approaches have been proposed, there is still no clear design methodology for user interfaces that tightly integrate hypertext and interactive 3D graphics. This paper presents a novel strategy for accessing information spaces, where hypertext and 3D graphics data are simultaneously available and interlinked. We introduce a Dual-Mode User Interface that has two modes between which a user can switch anytime: the driven by simple hypertext-based interactions “hypertext mode”, where a 3D scene is embedded in hypertext and the more immersive “3D mode”, which immerses the hypertextual annotations into the 3D scene. A user study is presented, which characterizes the interface in terms of its efficiency and usability. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Butler is a multi-application system based on Internet technology and virtual reality, designed to meet the needs of elderly users. Its objectives are to assist elderly populations in accessing technology and new forms of communication, replicating, as far as possible the way of lineal interaction that this population group had traditionally to interact with information in order to facilitate the first contacts with technology. Butler is equipped with e-mail, videoconferencing, blogging, access to the Internet through a well-known web search engine, image and sound gallery, new contacts searcher, and two virtual reality environments. In this paper we describe Butler''s most relevant features taking into account the usability design process and the usability evaluation of the system, which, after pilot testing, have proven to be highly acceptable and satisfactory to users. We also present the results of evaluations pertaining to the iconography used in the program, the navigation and users'' help design process, and the first functional prototype, all of which were designed and redesigned with the aid of web heuristics and guidelines for the web design for elderly users. Results suggest important features to be taken into account when designing and developing this sort of application for the elderly. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of color and texture descriptors considering the Web as the environment of use. We take into account the diversity and large-scale aspects of the Web considering a large number of descriptors (24 color and 28 texture descriptors, including both traditional and recently proposed ones). The evaluation is made on two levels: a theoretical analysis in terms of algorithms complexities and an experimental comparison considering efficiency and effectiveness aspects. The experimental comparison contrasts the performances of the descriptors in small-scale datasets and in a large heterogeneous database containing more than 230 thousand images. Although there is a significant correlation between descriptors performances in the two settings, there are notable deviations, which must be taken into account when selecting the descriptors for large-scale tasks. An analysis of the correlation is provided for the best descriptors, which hints at the best opportunities of their use in combination. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to: [(1)] The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase. [(2)] The conversion of the input to RDF form to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manager (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form. [(3)] A DM expressed as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control. [(4)] A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning. We describe preliminary studies and results for these, in particular a novel approach to enabling reinforcement learning for open dialogue systems through the detection of emotion in the speech signal and its deployment as a form of a learned DM, at a higher level than the DM virtual machine and able to direct the SC''s responses to a more emotionally appropriate part of its repertoire. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Small devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) are widely used to access the World Wide Web (Web). However, accessing the Web from small devices is affected by poor interface bandwidth, such as small keyboards and limited pointing devices. There is little empirical work investigating the input difficulties caused by such insufficient facilities, however, anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a link between able-bodied users of the mobile Web and motor impaired users of the Web on desktop computers. This being the case we could transfer the solutions which already exists for motor impaired users into the mobile Web and vice versa. This paper presents a user study that investigates the input errors of mobile Web users in both typing and pointing. The study identifies six types of typing errors and three types of pointing errors shared between our two user domains. We find that mobile Web users often confuse the different characters located on the same key, press keys that are adjacent to the target key, and miss certain key presses. When using a stylus, they also click in the wrong places, slide the stylus during multiple clicks, and make errors when dragging. Our results confirm that despite using different input devices, mobile Web users share common problems with motor impaired desktop users; and we therefore surmise that it will be beneficial to transfer available solutions between these user domains in order to address their common problems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The paper investigates the formation of information sharing communities. The environment is characterized by the anonymity of the contributors and users, as on the Web. Furthermore information exchange is limited to simple recommendations. When preferences differ, it is argued that a community may be worth forming because it facilitates the interpretation and understanding of the posted information. The admission rule within a community, the quality of information, and the stability of multiple communities are examined. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: XML has been acknowledged as the defacto standard for data representation and exchange over the World Wide Web. Being self describing grants XML its great flexibility and wide acceptance but on the other hand it is the cause of its main drawback that of being huge in size. The huge document size means that the amount of information that has to be transmitted, processed, stored, and queried is often larger than that of other data formats. Several XML compression techniques has been introduced to deal with these problems. In this paper, we provide a complete survey over the state-of-the-art of XML compression techniques. In addition, we present an extensive experimental study of the available implementations of these techniques. We report the behavior of nine XML compressors using a large corpus of XML documents which covers the different natures and scales of XML documents. In addition to assessing and comparing the performance characteristics of the evaluated XML compression tools, the study also tries to assess the effectiveness and practicality of using these tools in the real world. Finally, we provide some guidelines and recommendations which are useful for helping developers and users for making an effective decision towards selecting the most suitable XML compression tool for their needs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Based on the research model, language anxiety, prior non-native language experience, Internet self-efficacy and language self-efficacy are analyzed for the intention to use non-native language commercial web sites, respectively. Prior non-native language experience has affected language anxiety, language self-efficacy and intention to use non-native language commercial web sites, respectively. By the same token, whether or not Internet self-efficacy and language self-efficacy affected by language anxiety is also examined. A valid sample of 418 undergraduates was tested in this study. Regression analysis results fully supported the model tested. These results suggest that language anxiety, prior non-native language experience, language self-efficacy and Internet self-efficacy have an effect on the intention to use non-native language commercial web sites. Prior non-native language experience has significantly affected language anxiety, language self-efficacy and the intention to use the non-native language commercial web sites, respectively. Furthermore, language anxiety has significantly affected language self-efficacy and Internet self-efficacy, respectively. Educational research and practitioner implications are provided at the end of the paper. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: As cluster-based Web servers are increasingly adopted to host a variety of network-based services, improving the performance of such servers has become critical to satisfy the customers’ demands. Especially, the user response time is an important factor so that clients feel satisfied with the Web services. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of minimizing the response time of a server by exploiting the advantages of both user-level communication and coscheduling. We, thus, propose a coscheduled server model based on the recently proposed distributed PRESS Web server, where the remote cache accesses can be coscheduled on different nodes to reduce the response time. We experiment this concept using two known coscheduling techniques, called dynamic coscheduling (DCS) and DCS with immediate blocking. We have developed a comprehensive simulation testbed that captures the underlying communication layer in a cluster, the characteristics of various coscheduling algorithms, and the characteristics of the distributed server model to estimate the average delay and throughput with different system configurations. The accuracy of the VIA communication layer and the DCS mechanism is verified using measurements on a 16-node Linux cluster. Extensive simulation of four server models (PRESS over VIA, coscheduled PRESS model with DCS, with DCS and blocking, and Adaptive) using 32-node cluster configurations indicates that the average response time of a distributed server can be minimized significantly by coscheduling the communicating processes. The use of the DCS scheme reduced the average latency up to four times to the PRESS over VIA model that uses only user-level communication. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The web continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, and the amount of information on the web is overwhelming. Finding the relevant information remains a big challenge. Due to its wide distribution, its openness and high dynamics, the web is a complex system, for which we have to imagine mechanisms of content maintaining, filtering and organizing that are able to deal with its evolving dynamics and distribution. Integrating mechanisms of self-organization of the web content is an attractive perspective, to match with these requirements. Self-organized complex systems can be programmed using situated multi-agent systems with a coupling between the agents'' social organization and spatial organization. This paper explores the web from a complex adaptive system (CAS) perspective. It reviews some characteristic behaviors of CASs and shows how the web exhibits similar behaviors. We propose a model and a prototype of a system that addresses the dynamic web content organization, adopting the CAS vision and using the multi-agent paradigm. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Video transmission plays an important role in multimedia communication. Due to transmission error; robust video transmission has become increasingly important in providing better quality of services. Based on our proposed novel adaptive estimation scheme, this paper presents an efficient hybrid error concealment algorithm for robust video transmission. Using the information of neighboring macroblocks (MBs) of the corrupted MBs, the corrupted MBs are first classified into three types. According to the type of the corrupted MB, our proposed adaptive estimation scheme could adopt the Bézier surface estimation, the first-order plane estimation, or the centroid of major cluster estimation to conceal the corrupted MB efficiently. Based on six testing video sequences, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed hybrid error concealment algorithm can improve the video quality and the execution-time performance over different loss rates. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The preferential attachment graph is a random graph formed by adding a new vertex at each time step, with m edges which point to vertices selected at random with probability proportional to their degree. Thus at time n there are n vertices and mn edges. This process yields a graph which has been proposed as a simple model of the world wide web [A. Barabási, R. Albert, Emergence of scaling in random networks, Science 286 (1999) 509–512]. In this paper we show that if then whp the cover time of a simple random walk on is asymptotic to . [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the communications involved by the execution of a complex application, deployed on a heterogeneous large-scale distributed platform. Such applications intensively use collective macro-communication schemes, such as scatters, personalized all-to-alls or gather/reduce operations. Rather than aiming at minimizing the execution time of a single macro-communication, we focus on the steady-state operation. We assume that there is a large number of macro-communications to perform in pipeline fashion, and we aim at maximizing the throughput, i.e., the (rational) number of macro-communications which can be initiated every time-step. We target heterogeneous platforms, modeled by a graph where resources have different communication and computation speeds. The situation is simpler for series of scatters or personalized all-to-alls than for series of reduces operations, because of the possibility of combining various partial reductions of the local values, and of interleaving computations with communications. In all cases, we show how to determine the optimal throughput, and how to exhibit a concrete periodic schedule that achieves this throughput. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In distributed web caching architectures, institutional proxies take advantage of their neighbors’ contents in order to reduce the number of requests forwarded to the server. Intuitively, the maximum benefit from this cooperation is expected when the proxies that exhibit similar requests are grouped together. The current practice is to follow a static and manual configuration of neighbors. Such an approach has a number of drawbacks: (i) static allocation may not determine the best neighbors, especially if global knowledge of the participating proxies is not available, (ii) a manual allocation places significant administrative burden, (iii) static schemes are insensitive to changes in access patterns, and (iv) they cannot deal with the introduction of new, potentially useful, proxies. In this paper, we propose a set of algorithms that allow proxies to independently explore the network for better neighbors and continuously update their configuration in an adaptive fashion. The simulation experiments illustrate that dynamic neighbor reconfiguration leads to significantly higher hit ratios compared to the static approach. Although some researchers in the past have recognized the need for adaptive caching, to the best of our knowledge this is the first study to propose concrete algorithms and evaluate their efficacy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of verb–particle constructions, discussing their characteristics and availability in some lexical resources. Given the limited coverage provided by these resources and the constantly growing number of verb–particle combinations, possible ways of extending their coverage are investigated, taking into account regular patterns found in some productive combinations of verbs and particles. We propose, in particular, the use of a semantic classification of verbs (such as that defined by [English verb classes and alternations – a preliminary investigation, The University of Chicago Press]) as a means to obtain productive verb–particle constructions and the use of the World Wide Web to validate them, and discuss the issues involved in adopting such an approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The research work presented in this paper is about the design of a knowledge system architecture applied to oncology and relying on the semantic Web principles. The core of this architecture is a working knowledge system, called Kasimir, using an object-based representation formalism and classification-based reasoning. The ontology editor Protégé is connected with the Kasimir system, and is adapted to the particular requirements of Kasimir. The Protégé system enables the integration of several editing and visualization modules. A first knowledge editing module relies on classification-based reasoning for detecting mismatches and redundancies in the edited knowledge hierarchy. A second knowledge editing module also uses classification-based reasoning for comparing two versions of the knowledge base for maintenance purposes. This last module is particularly useful for extracting and analysing the changes occurred during an editing session. Three modules are combined to visualize hierarchies, based on three different techniques having complementary advantages. All these modules—including Kasimir and Protégé—are integrated in a semantic portal architecture based on semantic Web principles. The proposed architecture takes advantage of the semantic Web technologies for integrating the different modules, and for providing a reusable environment for distributed knowledge management in oncology. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Conventional access control mechanisms are rather insensitive to occurrences of context-dependent illegal accesses. Insensitivity to context-dependent accesses may lead to failure to protect network users and resources. Context-dependent illegal accesses resulting from data and privilege flows in open networks cannot be prevented by either authentication or access control mechanisms since unauthorized access need not be attempted. In this paper we present a protection model which tracks data and privilege flows in mobile code systems. It can uniformly define various types of illegal access patterns and has the advantage of preventing context-dependent illegal accesses such as those caused by inadvertent execution of remote mobile code containing viruses or Trojan Horses. The proposed flow control model is expected to complement the conventional model for access control. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

One of the important problems in content distribution networks is how to maintain the consistency of content at replicas with the origin server, especially for those documents changing dynamically. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid consistency algorithm that will generate less traffic than the traditional propagation approach, and the invalidation approach. The basic scheme is extended to the case in which requests are not evenly distributed over all replicas. We propose a hierarchical framework which allows replicas at different levels to make a decision based on the statistics collected. Extensive simulations are performed to examine how the traffic generated and the freshness ratio at replicas are affected by various parameters. We experiment with a wide range of request rates, update frequencies, and numbers of replicas. The results show that our approach can take advantage of content distribution networks and significantly reduce the traffic generated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Distributed web servers on the immensely expanding Internet require high scalability and availability to provide efficient services to millions of clients on the web. To provide rapid responses to enormous number of client requests, load balancing is an important technique to evenly distribute the requests to web servers. In this paper, we propose a framework called Mobile Agent based LoaD balancing (MALD) that uses mobile agents technology to implement scalable load balancing on distributed web servers. The web servers can dispatch mobile agents to collect system-wide load information and accomplish load redistribution on all servers. Various load-balancing policies can be incorporated with versatile mobile agents in the framework. Compared with the traditional message-passing-based load-balancing methods, the mobile-agent-based approaches have the merits of high flexibility, low network traffic and high asynchrony. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the MALD framework provides a foundation to develop efficient load-balancing schemes on wide range of web server systems from cluster to the Internet. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Due to the emergence of the HTTP/1.1 standards, persistent connections are increasingly being used in web retrieval. This paper studies the caching performance of web clusters under persistent connections, focusing on the difference between session-grained and request-grained allocation strategies adopted by the web switch. It is shown that the content-based algorithm considerably improves caching performance over the content-blind algorithm at the request-grained level. However, most of the performance gain is offset by the allocation dependency that arises when the content-based algorithm is used at the session-grained level. The performance loss increases with cluster size and connection holding time. An optimization problem is formulated to investigate the best achievable caching performance under session-grained allocation. Based on a heuristic approach, a session-affinity aware algorithm is presented that makes use of the correlation between the requests in a session. Experimental results show that while the session-affinity aware algorithm outperforms the content-based algorithm under session-grained allocation, this optimization cannot fully compensate for the performance loss caused by allocation dependency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Requests for dynamic and personalized content have increasingly become a significant part of Internet traffic, driven both by a growth in dynamic Web services and a “trickle-down” effect stemming from the effectiveness of caches and content-distribution networks at serving static content. To efficiently serve this trend, several server-side and cache-side techniques have recently been proposed. Although such techniques, which exploit different forms of reuse at the sub-document level, appear promising, a significant impediment to their widespread deployment is (1) the absence of good models describing characteristics of dynamic Web content and (2) the lack of effective synthetic content generators, which reduce the effort involved in verifying the effectiveness of a proposed solution.This paper addresses both of these shortcomings. Its primary contribution is a set of models that capture the characteristics of dynamic content both in terms of independent parameters such as the distributions of object sizes and their freshness times, as well as derived parameters such as content reusability across time and linked documents. These models are derived from an analysis of the content from six representative news and e-commerce sites, using both size-based and level-based splitting techniques to infer document objects. A secondary contribution is a Java-based dynamic content emulator, which uses these models to generate edge-side include-based dynamic content and serve requests for whole documents as well as separate objects. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In 1996, two searchable databases covering insect pathogens were posted on the World Wide Web: the Ecological Database of the World’s Insect Pathogens (EDWIP) and the Viral Diseases of Insects in the Literature database (VIDIL). In this paper, we describe the format and contents of EDWIP and VIDIL on the World Wide Web. EDWIP contains over 9400 pathogen–host association records, 677 negative test result or “no association” records, 4454 host species, 2285 pathogen species records, and 2057 bibliographical references. Species of Coleoptera and Lepidoptera are the best represented groups in EDWIP. Lepidopteran species account for the most associations of any host order in EDWIP, over 2500, or 27%. Of the pathogen groups, Protozoa (including microsporidia) accounted for nearly 66% of the pathogen species records and over 40% of the association records in EDWIP. Fungi account for only 18% of the pathogen species, but nearly 33% of the association records. Habitats dominated by human activities (e.g., crop, stored product, and human dwelling) account for most of the host habitats recorded in EDWIP. The United States and Japan are the most common locations and the Nearctic and Palearctic are the most common biogeographic regions reported in EDWIP. There are 4801 annotated bibliographic records in VIDIL. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The Back button on web browsers is one of the world''s most heavily used user interface components, yet its behaviour is commonly misunderstood. This paper describes the evaluation of a “temporal” alternative to the normal “stack-based” behaviour of Back and Forward. The main difference of the temporal scheme is that it maintains a complete list of previously visited pages. The evaluation compares the efficiency of the stack and temporal schemes in an “out of the box” scenario in which participants were asked to use a “new” version of a commercial browser without any explanation of the presence or absence of new features. This scenario allows us to predict the likely usability impact if commercial browsers were released supporting the temporal scheme. The results showed that the relative efficiency of the two schemes differed across different types of navigational task. In particular, the temporal system poorly supported backtracking to parent pages, but performed better for more distant navigation tasks. The temporal scheme also caused extreme usage patterns, with the subjects either solving tasks very efficiently or very inefficiently, depending on whether they used the Back menu. This observation indicates that adaptations of the temporal system that improve the effectiveness of the Back menu may enhance web navigation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The mass of information now available on web sites has greatly increased the web''s popularity and, consequently, the demand for its convenient access and use. The InternetIntranet phenomenon provides some 50 million people with access to multiple sources of information. However, the current techniques for retrieving and navigating do not make it easy for the user to satisfy his/her needs. This paper aims to show how user communities can be enabled to unlock the information stored in web documents. We start from the observation that authors shape their documents to clarify the intended meaning, and readers in turn exploit document shape to synthetically grasp this meaning. Thus, the web document can be seen as a structure composed of different types of information units (such as images, tables, movies, videos, sounds, titles and paragraphs). These units are shaped, represented and organized in the document so that it transmits its message according to the cultural formation of its author. From our investigation of collections of web documents we have derived some heuristics to use in shaping the document in order to emphasize its content. These heuristics can be exploited to manage and retrieve semantic information on the web.Since human computer interaction with the web is preponderantly visual, we propose a visual approach in customizing web documents, and in indexing and querying the Web through the browser. This approach is based on a method of annotating HTML documents so that their shape and contents can be reorganized to satisfy the requirements of different readers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The World-Wide Web can be viewed as a collection of semi-structured multimedia documents in the form of Web pages connected through hyperlinks. Unlike most web search engines, which primarily focus on information retrieval functionality, WebDB aims at supporting a comprehensive database-like query functionality, including selection, aggregation, sorting, summary, grouping, and projection. WebDB allows users to access (1) document level information, such as title, URL, length, keywords types and last modified date; (2) intra-document structures, such as tables, forms and images and (3) inter-document linkage information, such as destination URLs and anchors. With these three types of information, comprehensive queries for complex Web-based applications, such as Web mining and Web site management, can be answered. WebDB is based on object-relational concepts: Object-oriented modeling and relational query language. In this paper, we present the data model, language and implementation of WebDB. We also present the novel visual query/browsing interface for semi-structured Web and Web documents. Our system provides high usability compared with other existing systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we introduce an XML-based hierarchical QoS markup language, called HQML, to enhance distributed multimedia applications on the World Wide Web (WWW) with quality of service (QoS) capability. The design ofHQML is based on two observations: (1) the absence of a systematic QoS specification language, that can be used by distributed multimedia applications on the WWW to utilize the state-of-the-art QoS management technology and (2) the power and popularity of XML to deliver richly structured contents over the Web. HQML allows distributed multimedia applications to specify all kinds of application-specific QoS policies and requirements. During runtime, the HQML Executor translates the HQML file into desired data structures and cooperates with the QoS proxies that assist applications in end-to-end QoS negotiation, setup and enforcement. In order to make QoS services tailored toward user preferences and meet the challenges of uncertainty in the distributed heterogeneous environments, the design of HQML is featured as interactive andflexible . In order to allow application developers to create HQML specifications correctly and easily, we have designed and developed a unified visual QoS programming environment, called QoSTalk. In QoSTalk, we adopt a grammatical approach to perform consistency check on the visual QoS specifications and generate HQML files automatically. Finally, we introduce the distributed QoS compiler, which performs the automatic mappings between application- and resource-level QoS parameters to relieve the application developer of the burden of dealing with low-level QoS specifications. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Individuals, groups and organizations host places in the World Wide Web to attract visitors, but once they have established a web presence they usually maintain little or no awareness of visiting activity. However, the standard web infrastructure supports the capture of detailed activity-related information. In the first part of this paper, we contribute a preliminary study conducted with expert web hosts in different domains, investigating the use of information on visiting activity as feedback for web operation. From this study, we infer general requirements for web awareness support, based on which we have designed two systems aimed to promote more awareness of web activity and visitors. The first is a system supporting ambient notification of web events, end-user configurability, and ambient display for overview and comparison of activity in a web place. The second system moves beyond awareness of web activity to provide glances into the visitors'' sites, introducing reciprocity to the host–visitor relationship. Both systems have been prototyped and deployed in work environments for an evaluation in everyday use. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper overviews a Web-based collaborative system called TeamSCOPE that has been designed to support awareness needs of globally distributed teams. Four types of awareness needs of virtual teams are defined and the awareness support features of TeamSCOPE are described. The usage patterns of eight globally distributed engineering design teams are outlined, and evaluation results are provided. Findings illustrate how group process interacts with technology to create design challenges in the support of virtual team awareness needs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]