The goal of this research is to find out which information about others and the environment is necessary to develop a sense of social awareness and to provide this information in an application independent way. As a general solution, we will develop an open and application independent infrastructure for the creation, distribution and presentation of events that indicate the presence, actions and movements of people, agents, or objects that populate a Social Web as well as real world spaces. For a community of people with similar interests and tasks it is beneficial to contribute and share their knowledge. The social process of capturing and constructing shared knowledge in a virtual environment is not yet well understood and an intriguing research issue. Our approach takes the documents which the community collects and produces as the main carrier of knowledge.
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We are exploring the idea of a concept index that, starting from highlighted keywords in a collection of documents, generates conceptual relations that are implicit otherwise. A concept index allows to enrich a document with visual cues that stress a particular perspective, to cross-reference the documents via a conceptual hyperspace, and to establish a shared vocabulary. In this context, we will also use text mining tools to support the discovery and management of knowledge in the documents of a group. All these tools will be integrated into a shared workspace system. The LiveMarks system uses agents as mediators to help people in finding useful information on the World Wide Web.