A Collaboration-centric Taxonomy of the Internet of Things: Implications for Awareness Support

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to become a new collaboration modality. Building on this proposition, we developed a taxonomy to explore how the IoT can enable collaboration, and conversely, how current knowledge on collaboration systems can guide IoT system development and research. The taxonomy is grounded in IoT use cases and bridges the technical and human aspects by drawing on collaboration and computer network theories. Our preliminary analysis of a subset of the taxonomy suggested that providing awareness support to IoT system users is likely to be a fundamental challenge in IoT system design. Our subsequent conceptualization of the entire taxonomy—what we present in this paper—applies awareness theory to arrive at a novel, comprehensive, and structured understanding of the awareness needs of IoT system users. This understanding can be leveraged as a formative tool by system developers to identify requirements and by researchers to develop design guidance for effective collaboration in IoT systems.