User assistance for collaborative knowledge construction

Abstract : In this paper, we study tools for providing assistance to users in distributed spaces. More precisely, we focus on the activity of collaborative construction of knowledge, supported by a network of distributed semantic wikis. Assisting the users in such an activity is made necessary mainly by two factors: the inherent complexity of the tools supporting that activity, and the collaborative nature of the activity, involving many interactions between users. In this paper we focus on the second aspect. For this, we propose to build an assistance tool based on users interaction traces. This tool will provide a contextualized assistance by leveraging the valuable knowledge contained in traces. We discuss the issue of assistance in our context and we show the different types of assistance that we intend to provide through three scenarios. We highlight research questions raised by this preliminary study.