Temporal Aspects of Tasks in the User Action Notation

The need for communication among a multiplicity of cooperating roles in user interface development translates into the need for a common set of interface design representation techniques. The important difference between design of the interaction part of the interface and design of the interface software calls for representation techniques with a behavioral view---a view that focuses on user interaction rather than on the software. The User Action Notation (UAN) is a user- and task-oriented notation that describes physical (and other) behavior of the user and interface as they perform a task together. The primary abstraction of the UAN is a user task. The work reported here addresses the need to identify temporal relationships within user task descriptions and to express explicitly and precisely how designers view temporal relationships among those tasks. Drawing on simple temporal concepts such as events in time and preceding and overlapping of time intervals, we identify basic temporal relationships among tasks: sequence, waiting, repeated disjunction, order independence, interruptibility, one-way interleavability, mutual interleavability, and concurrency. The UAN temporal relations, through the notion of modal logic, offer an explicit and precise representation of the specific kinds of temporal behavior that can occur in asynchronous user interaction, without the need to detail all cases that might result

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Task Flow Modeling in Electronic Business Environments

In recent years, internet based commerce has developed as a new paradigm. Many factors such as "at home delivery", easy ordering, and usually lower prices contributed to the success of the e-commerce. However, more recently, companies realized that one of the major factors in having a successful internet based business is the design of a user interface that is in concordance with the users' expectations, which includes both functionality and user friendly features. The func-tionality feature of an e-business interface is one of the most important elements when discussing about a specific internet based business. In our paper, we present methods to model task flows for e-business interfaces. We strengthen our study with the design modeling of a practical scenario that may appear in an on-line commercial environment.task flow, e-business, hierarchical model, user interface, human-computer interaction

Explaining how to play real-time strategy games

Real-time strategy games share many aspects with real situations in domains such as battle planning, air traffic control, and emergency response team management which makes them appealing test-beds for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. End-user annotations could help to provide supplemental information for learning algorithms, especially when training data is sparse. This paper presents a formative study to uncover how experienced users explain game play in real-time strategy games. We report the results of our analysis of explanations and discuss their characteristics that could support the design of systems for use by experienced real-time strategy game users in specifying or annotating strategy-oriented behavior

GTA: Groupware task analysis Modeling complexity

The task analysis methods discussed in this presentation stem from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ethnography (as applied for the design of Computer Supported Cooperative Work CSCW), different disciplines that often are considered conflicting approaches when applied to the same design problems. Both approaches have their strength and weakness, and an integration of them does add value to the early stages of design of cooperation technology. In order to develop an integrated method for groupware task analysis (GTA) a conceptual framework is presented that allows a systematic perspective on complex work phenomena. The framework features a triple focus, considering (a) people, (b) work, and (c) the situation. Integrating various task-modeling approaches requires vehicles for making design information explicit, for which an object oriented formalism will be suggested. GTA consists of a method and framework that have been developed during practical design exercises. Examples from some of these cases will illustrate our approach

Modeling IoT-aware Business Processes - A State of the Art Report

This research report presents an analysis of the state of the art of modeling Internet of Things (IoT)-aware business processes. IOT links the physical world to the digital world. Traditionally, we would find information about events and processes in the physical world in the digital world entered by humans and humans using this information to control the physical world. In the IoT paradigm, the physical world is equipped with sensors and actuators to create a direct link with the digital world. Business processes are used to coordinate a complex environment including multiple actors for a common goal, typically in the context of administrative work. In the past few years, we have seen research efforts on the possibilities to model IoT- aware business processes, extending process coordination to real world entities directly. This set of research efforts is relatively small when compared to the overall research effort into the IoT and much of the work is still in the early research stage. To create a basis for a bridge between IoT and BPM, the goal of this report is to collect and analyze the state of the art of existing frameworks for modeling IoT-aware business processes.Comment: 42 page