Successful (cooperative) work requires that the involved workers develop a common understanding of the modalities of their interaction. This work aims at extending the scope of alignment support by explicitly considering the perceptions and needs of individuals.

The cooperative creation of diagrammatic models as representations of mental models can aid the alignment of individual views and the development of a common understanding. The main feature for cooperation support is that modeling takes places on a simultaneously accessible and physically manipulable modeling surface. The method thus is complemented with a tabletop interface – a horizontally mounted interaction surface that is augmented with computer support – to effectively support the alignment of individual views on cooperative work processes.

Tangible tokens are used to cooperatively build models on the interaction surface. Cooperation is further supported by additional features like reconstruction support for former model states. Persistent model representation is based upon the standardized XML Topic Map format, which allows for a reusable, self-contained representation of generic semantic networks.