Towards an Awareness Taxonomy

[Context] Awareness is a well-known but still not fully reached concept in collaborative environments. At this point, two main potential issues remain open: First, the understanding of what awareness is and how to face it in collaborative applications; Second, the establishment of a solid basis for the assessment focusing on awareness aspects. [Goal] We elaborated an awareness taxonomy that contemplates a broad set of awareness elements and collaboration aspects necessary for cooperative work. We developed our awareness taxonomy through a systematic mapping study over the last-10-years CSCW publications regarding the design, development, and evaluation of groupware systems that addressed awareness and collaboration aspects. [Result] We developed a comprehensive multidimensional taxonomy, represented in three main awareness dimensions, namely, collaboration, workspace, and contextual, which encompass, in a simplified way, the awareness literature presented by other models.