Generating collaborative work processes

The paper describes ways to support collaboration in business processes. Collaborative processes are different from predefined processes in the sense that they can change dynamically as the situation emerges. Such changes can be time consuming as they require users to continually adapt the system to changing contexts. The solution proposed here to support process evolution is to provide generic work objects and use software agents to assist users to dynamically change the process by quickly adding or changing work objects. The paper outlines a way of describing work processes in terms of generic work objects. The structure of the generic work objects is based on a metamodel, which provides the fundamental concepts to define generic objects. A prototype implementation is then described

An agent framework for learning systems

Personalized learning systems must allow learners to choose their learning goals and learning process. This paper describes a way for providing agent support that can assist learners to do this. The paper then proposes a framework of software agents made up of two parts. One are customizing agents that assist learners to select learning materials to satisfy learning objectives and set up a learning plan. The other are managing agents that help learners to follow a study program to progress through that material and dynamically change the process as needed. The paper describes a way to describe learning process that can be used by such agents and illustrates with a small prototype

Open modeling for designing community ecosystems

The paper proposes an open approach to modeling to cater for the emerging trend to complex adaptive systems. Such systems are seen as collections of people, programs, computers and other physical objects that must coexist and work towards a vision in a continually changing environment. The information system here is perceived as a network of physical, knowledge and other kinds of entities connected into a network that emerges as the environment evolves. The paper describes a community oriented approach to model such systems where each community is seen as a collection of such entities. The communities themselves are connected to create a system of systems or a community ecosystem where the communities collaborate to realize a continually emerging vision. The paper describes an open modeling approach for such ecosystems to provide designers a systematic way to design community coordination. It first uses living systems and complexity as metaphors to design community structures that ensure collaboration persists over a long time. The modeling methods provide a flexible approach to show networks of community collaborating within their context. An open approach is to provide users with a flexible method to create community networks using semantics natural to the user and emphasizing perspectives to visualize the complex relationships within such systems

Designing Collaborative Infrastructures for Business

Business processes are becoming more collaborative in nature to improve competitiveness through sharing knowledge. The goal is to capture knowledge as part of business activities and make it available throughout the organization. Knowledge capture is still not part of most design methodologies, which do not include collaboration as part of the design process but focus on business activities. This paper describes ways to include collaboration in design by using an extension ofsocial networks to model collaboration. The extension is called enterprise social networks, which are used to define the collaborative architecture, which specifies knowledge sharing within enterprises. The paper then shows how to integrate enterprise social networks into process design with the goal of developing a technology infrastructure to support the collaboration architecture

Software Agents for facilitating collaboration among students in e-learning

Computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is one promising technological means to support e-learning over the Internet. However, current CSCL systems work mostly in a passive fashion and do not attempt to take active control of the collaboration. In such systems, it is the responsibility of the participating students to organize and accomplish all the activities of collaborative learning (CL). Students get little assistance from the system during the CL, e.g. the composition of a CL group, the partition of a learning task, the combination of learning outcomes, etc. This paper seeks to actively help and guide students in the CL by software agents. The CSCL over the Internet is first investigated where some challenges for the students while they are taking part in the CL are highlighted. Based on the investigation, a multi-agent architecture to facilitate the CL is proposed. Then, the implementation in one particular CSCL system, LiveNet, is presented and the supports of the agents for the CL are explored. At the final are the conclusions of the paper and some outlooks