Abstract not found

The research into the Ariadne system- and its coordination language HOPLa- aims to provide generic support for hybrid collaborative processes. These are complex information processing tasks involving coordinated contributions from multiple people and tools. Ariadne should applicable for a broad spectrum of these processes and actively support people in working in these processes and in defining and managing. A key design issue is flexibility. It should be easy for users to model and perform new (kinds of) processes even if this happens during the work on the process itself. Processes in Ariadne combine a shared workspace with the ability to define tasks and to coordinate their execution. The workspace uses a tree-like data model and can hold arbitrarily structured data. It is self-descriptive which means that it not only holds actual data but also the constraints (i.e. type definitions) that govern its structure. The definition of the way of working in a process can be blended into the workspace. Nodes in the workspace can be marked as tasks to be performed. Aditional coordination operators and constraints e.g. on time or performer of a task can be attached. Ariadne keeps track of the execution state of each process and uses this for support. When tasks are to be performed, actors are notified and results of the work are stored again in the workspace. The execution state of the process is stored in the workspace too, so that processes are self-contained.

The areas of domain engineering, vertical application frameworks, and business objects have generated considerable interest in industry and the research community during the last few years. In order for systems to be successfully implemented from such application frameworks, there are two major concerns that must be addressed: how do we maintain non-interfering applications and how do we minimize bias towards any individual application in developing the domain model? In other words, as we add new applications, we need to ensure that they are not destructive to each other. We also need to make certain that as we expand the domain model to accommodate new applications, that these future applications are not unnecessarily constrained or complex. Most of the related work to date has focused on defining the architectural structure of application frameworks or on maintaining structural and behavioral consistency. For my Ph.D. thesis, I propose to develop a conceptual framework for integrating various techniques to facilitate managing the evolution of a business domain architecture. As part of this conceptual framework, I distinguish between a ‘good design ’ and a ‘legal design’. In order to demonstrate the

Collaborative work typically involves both individual and group activities. Individual efforts may be combined through group negotiation processes. Personal perspectives on shared information are thereby intertwined and merged into group understanding. Computer support for personal and group perspectives allows people to view and work on a shared information repository in different contexts. The challenge for perspective mechanisms is how to manage the merging of results from individual perspectives into a consensus. Computer support for negotiation addresses the problem of merging individual results through voting and discussion. The challenge for negotiation mechanisms is how to allow work to continue while issues are being negotiated. WEBGUIDE is a software prototype that combines support for perspectives and negotiation so that individual results can be systematically merged while work continues within personal perspectives. A WEBGUIDE interface has been designed in detail to work out the many issues involved in intertwining perspectives and negotiation mechanisms. The application domain for illustrating WEBGUIDE is the support of web research by teams of middle school students. The WEBGUIDE system makes explicit and scaffolds for these students the structure of web research, team collaboration, personal perspectives, and group negotiation that they may be experiencing for the first time in their lives.