Contemporary business process systems are built to automate routine procedures. Automation demands well-understood domains, repetitive processes, clear organisational roles, an established terminol ...

Interactive Process Models

Early hypertext systems were monolithic and closed, but newer systems tend to be open, distributed, and support collaboration. While this development has resulted in increased openness and flexibility, integration or adaptation of various different tools (such as content editors, viewers, services, or even other link servers) has remained a tedious task. Many developers were implementing essentially similar components, simply for the benefit of having their own platform on which to experiment with hypertexts. The open hypermedia community is addressing this issue of interoperability between open hypermedia systems. The goal of this effort is to provide an open framework that can be used by application developers outside the community to construct more powerful hypermedia-aware applications. The design and evolution of this framework is presented along with the requirements that drove its development. The framework has matured to the point where it has supported the creation of a number of researc...

https://www.gronbak.dk/kgronbak/publications/uploads/Reich.pdf

Addressing Interoperability in Open Hypermedia: The Design of the Open Hypermedia Protocol

Access control needs to be more flexible and fine-grained to support cooperative tasks and processes performed by dynamic teams. This can be done by applying state-of-theart role-based access control (RBAC) technology. This paper examines how to integrate RBAC in a team-based organization context and how to apply such access control to hypermedia structures. Based on the analysis of these issues, a team-and-role-based access control model is proposed, which describes various aspects of role-based access control in cooperative hypermedia environments. The model has been implemented in CHIPS, a cooperative hypermedia-based process support system. Application examples demonstrate that its organizational context management and access permission authorization retain the simplicity of RBAC. Our extensions provide effective and flexible access control for managing various kinds of shared workspaces, especially shared process spaces, where access control is not only used for managing security, but also for supporting coordination.

Team-and-role-based organizational context and access control for cooperative hypermedia environments

Collaboration space object model provides for a place consisting of rooms created by users interacting with a client browser. A skin (i.e., theme) may be used as template for creating places. PlaceBots (i.e., agents) provide for accessing, processing and managing data in a place. HTML may be dragged and dropped into a place, where it is parsed and corresponding place fields created. MS Excel or Word documents may be dragged and dropped into a place, which creates a corresponding form, and users may create new documents using that form. A place type comprising a template of an entire place, or collaboration space, may be used to create new places. Changes made to a place may be reported, subject to security controls, by selecting what's new. Task fields are provided allowing web browser creation of forms for work flow. Place enabled objects are provided for synchronous communications. A quick browse feature provides a simplified format for browser windows based on selection of HTML links. MS Office documents may launched within a place for in place editing and importing the resulting document into the place.

Method and system for importing HTML forms

This paper presents a novel approach to the development and operation of dynamic networked organization. The approach is based on the idea of using interactive models. Interactive models are visual models of enterprise aspects that can be viewed, traversed, analyzed, simulated, adapted and executed by industrial users as part of their work. The approach was developed in the EXTERNAL-project, where experiences from three case studies were used as a basis for validation and further enhancement of the approach in follow-up projects. The main innovative contributions include an environment to support concurrent modelling, meta-modelling, management and performance of work, integrated support for planned and emergent processes, and customisable model- and process-driven integration.

/pdf/interactive-models-for-supporting-networked-organisations-9n0lg89qdv.pdf

Interactive Models for Supporting Networked Organisations

In this paper, we present a cooperative hypermedia-based process support system focusing on flexible business processes. An analysis of the communication, coordination and cooperation requirements of business processes reveals a gap in current computer support. We propose to address these requirements by extending a cooperative hypermedia system with process support. The resulting system, called CHIPS, uses hypermedia-based activity spaces to model the structural, relational, and computational semantics of both individual tasks and processes. Application examples demonstrate that the CHIPS system retains the intuitive usability of hypertext and can support a wide range of business processes.

Flexible support for business processes: extending cooperative hypermedia with process support

In this paper, we present a cooperative hypermedia based process support system focusing on flexible business processes. An analysis of the communication, coordination and cooperation requirements of business processes reveals a gap in current computer support. We propose to address these requirements by extending a cooperative hypermedia system with process support. The resulting system, called CHIPS, uses hypermedia based activity spaces to model the structural, relational, and computational semantics of both individual tasks and processes. Application examples demonstrate that the CHIPS system retains the intuitive usability of hypertext and can support a wide range of business processes.

/pdf/flexible-support-for-business-processes-extending-o4g1hm6m2b.pdf

Most distributed meeting support systems focus on meeting management and audio/video communication mechanisms. They provide little support for a flexible meeting process and a shared information space with structure-rich visual artifacts. In this work, a cooperative visual hypermedia system is developed to provide visual hypermedia artifacts for team members to manipulate in a distributed meeting. The visual hypermedia system is a hypermedia-based drawing system that integrates visual hypermedia artifacts and structures found in multiple hypertext domains. In addition, the visual hypermedia is integrated with process support for flexible meeting control and for easy setup of audio/video and application sharing communication channels. A use cases is presented, which shows that using the cooperative visual hypermedia, distributed teams can perform many kinds of meetings, in the meantime, enjoying dedicated support for the planning, control, information management, and follow-up activities of a distributed meeting.

/pdf/a-cooperative-visual-hypermedia-approach-to-planning-and-2juug9is6b.pdf

A Cooperative Visual Hypermedia Approach to Planning and Conducting Virtual Meetings

The trend towards rapid development and globalization of business activities requires business teams to carry out their projects in a distributed environment. Changes in the environment as well as in the team require these teams to continuously learn and to learn new knowledge and skills and to adapt their work processes. In such a distributed working and learning setting, team members need a shared information space to interact with various information resources and to coordinate and communicate to harmonize their actions. In our approach we combine work (i.e. the definition and execution of work processes) and learning (i.e. the learning and practicing of work processes) of distributed project teams. A cooperative visual hypermedia environment has been developed which offers support for cooperative work and learning. This visual environment provides various real-time dynamic views of the underlying work processes. These views help team members to identify situations that trigger a need for cooperative learning. By combining the work and the learning processes, this environment offers new possibilities for cooperative learning in distributed project teams such as process simulation, guided tours by experts through process descriptions and best practice examples, and cooperative role-play for practicing work processes.

Weigang Wang

Papers

Flexible support for business processes: extending cooperative hypermedia with process support

Flexible support for business processes: extending cooperative hypermedia with process support

A Cooperative Visual Hypermedia Approach to Planning and Conducting Virtual Meetings

Supporting Cooperative Learning in Distributed Project Teams