Awareness as defined by Dourich "**is an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity. This context is used to** 

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ensure that individual contributions are relevant to the group's activity as a whole and to evaluate individual actions with respect to group goals and 
                                                                                                                                                       
progress." [6] Group awareness is achieved by capturing each actor's activities and the signals emanating from him/her in order to communicate them with 
                                                                                                                                                       
his/her collaborators. 
                    

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Our approach for managing the interactions among collaborating EI actors is by implementing three levels of group awareness: 
- **Workspace awareness: allows EI actors to have knowledge about the state of the shared workspace and its evolution. Workspace awareness can be** 
achieved through a synchronous collaborative whiteboard or a shared editor. In an asynchronous collaboration situation, it can be achieved by facilitating workspace persistence. In the prototype we developed, we combined two approaches: shared interface and workspace persistence. -
 Presence awareness: allows to know the actors that are online at any given time and their availability. 

- **Activity awareness: handles the communication of all activities been carried out by the different actors in the collaborative environment. It allows the** 
actors to be aware of one another's activities in real time. 

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5. Application scenario 
                       
 The propositions made in this paper have been implemented in two different systems. The first system called EIKC (Economic Intelligence Knowledge 
                                                                                             
Capitalization) system allows for knowledge sharing and capitalization during decision problem identification and definition process. It also caters for the 
                                                                                             
translation of the decision problem into information problem. This system allows EI actors to realize these tasks in a collaborative manner and it automatically 
                                                                                             
captures the expressed knowledge for capitalization purpose. 
                                   

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EIKC system is simulated with a scenario of DP project stated below:

The recent 2010/2011NECO GCE results released by National Examinations Council of Nigeria (NECO) show that 98% of candidates failed the examination1**. This poses a major challenge to all stakeholders.** 

This scenario can be considered as a decision problem. Figures 7-10 show how knowledge is elicited and capitalized among the participating EI actors in solving this problem. Decision maker presents the decision problem as initial demand and its contexts - internal and external environment using the interface 

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shown in figure 7. This formulated initial demand is viewed by other participating actors as shown in figure 8. Subsequently, the watcher defines the stake of 
                                                                                                                                                              
the DP using the annotation interface as illustrated in figure 9. Decision maker used annotation interface for the validation of the specified stake while the 
                                                                                                                                                              
timestamp is also stored (figure 10). The watcher reacts to decision maker's annotation and update DP stake accordingly. This process is repeated until 
                                                                                                                                                              
concession is reached. The knowledge of the subsequent tasks of the resolution process is capitalized with respective links on the EIKC system interface. 
                                                                                                                                                              
Actors exploit the KM system by visualizing both validated and pre-validated or evolving knowledge of specific tasks of resolving DP according to EI 
                                                                                                                                                              
process. 
        

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