Alessandra Agostini

A Light Workflow Management System Using SimpleProcess Models

Workflow management systems are considereda hot technology. Nevertheless, up to now they havenot had the diffusion other packages such asproductivity tools, E-mail systems and groupwareplatforms have. We believe that this fact is due tothe many limitations of current workflow technology(weak support for changes; complex exception handlingmechanisms; limited openness to and integrability withother system components;...) and that radically newworkflow management systems should be designed anddeveloped in order to offer adequate products to themarket. In this paper, we outline the main innovativefeatures of the workflow management component of theMilano system making it highly flexible and adaptable.Particular attention is paid to its modellingframework, which is based on a class of net systemswell supported by efficient algorithms, and to theservices it offers to both workflow designers andactors. The most relevant aspects of the MILANOworkflow management system are also illustratedthrough a realistic example.

Improving Flexibility of Workflow Management Systems

In order to support both the redesign of a Business Process and its continuous improvement, the technology supporting it must be as flexible as possible. Since workflow management systems are the main technology for supporting Business Processes, they and, in particular, their modeling framework must satisfy a long list of apparently conflicting requirements: the models must be both cognitive artifacts and executable programs; they must be simple and yet able to support exceptions; they must support both static and dynamic changes. In this chapter, after briefly discussing the above requirements, we present the formal aspects of the modeling framework of the MILANO workflow management system. Its flexibility is based on a net-theoretical modeling framework which lets simple process models deliver a large class of services to its users.

Contexts, work processes, and workspaces

In this paper a framework for the conceptual modelling of organizational contexts is provided and it is embodied into an extension of the TOSCA organizational handbook.The context of a work process is relevant since the effectiveness of the cooperation among its actors is highly dependent on their awareness of it. It requires, on the one hand, that the context is made available in terms of visibility and/or transparency; on the other, that at any time a selection is made so that only what is relevant to the context is provided, leaving the rest in the background. With respect to the first requirement a model of the organizational context is needed, so that all the information regarding its dimensions can be linked together. With respect to the second requirement, a work process model provides some guidelines for designing a system offering a selective access to the context of a work process. The workspace metaphor is a good paradigm to make that information ready at hand, since it is the natural framework within which people do their work.

Loosely coupling ontological reasoning with an efficient middleware for context-awareness

Context-awareness in mobile and ubiquitous computing requires the acquisition, representation and processing of information which goes beyond the device features, network status, and user location, to include semantically rich data, like user interests and user current activity. On the other hand, when services have to be provided on-the-fly to many mobile users, the efficiency of reasoning with these data becomes a relevant issue. Experimental evidence has lead us to consider currently impractical a tight integration of ontological reasoning with rule based reasoning at the time of request. This paper illustrates a hybrid approach where ontological reasoning is loosely coupled with the efficient rule-based reasoning of a middleware architecture for service adaptation. While rule-based reasoning is performed at the time of service request to evaluate adaptation policies and reconcile possibly conflicting context information, ontological reasoning is mostly performed asynchronously by local context providers to derive non-shallow context information. A limited form of ontological reasoning is activated at the time of request only when essential for service provisioning.

Towards Highly Adaptive Services for Mobile Computing

The heterogeneity of device capabilities, network conditions and user contexts that is associated with mobile computing has emphasized the need for more advanced forms of adaptation of Internet services. This paper presents a framework that addresses this issue by managing distributed profile information and adaptation policies, solving possible conflicts by means of an inference engine and prioritization techniques. The profile information considered in the framework is very broad, including user preferences, device and network capabilities, and user location and context. The framework has been validated by experiments on the efficiency of the proposed conflict resolution mechanism, and by the implementation of the main components of the architecture. The paper also illustrates a specific testbed application in the context of proximity marketing.

Rethinking CSCW systems: the architecture of MILANO

After eleven years, CSCW is a well recognized research field which has generated, among other things, some new theoretical findings on work practices and cooperation and some new systems that are successfully applied by several organizations. The evaluation of successful applications from the point of view of the above recalled CSCW theories indicates some requirements (openness, continuity, contextualization and language-action integration) that the new generation of CSCW systems should satisfy. The prototype of the MILANO system is a working example of how those requirements can be met and of the challenges a full development of the CSCW potential poses to system designers and developers.

Reengineering a business process with an innovative workflow management system: a case study

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been proposed as a new approach to facing the challenge of improving the quality of a business process while reducing its costs. Workgroup computing systems can be considered as the best candidates for BPR, since they aim to improve the effectiveness of the group of people collaborating within a work process. In particular workflow management systems seem to offer the best support to a reengineered business process. In this paper we report on a case of BPR. It consists in the application to a real bank procedure of both a new approach to the analysis of work processes (allowing the evaluation of its transaction costs) and a prototype of a Workflow Management System (WMS), allowing an effective handling of procedure breakdowns without forcing the designers to take care of them.

Hybrid reasoning in the CARE middleware for context awareness

The Context Aggregation and REasoning (CARE) middleware aims at supporting context-aware adaptation of internet services in a mobile computing environment. Context awareness requires the acquisition, representation and processing of information that goes beyond raw context data – like device features, network status and user location – to include semantically rich data such as the current activity and interests of users. Representing and reasoning with the latter class of data require the use of ontologies and ontological reasoning. It is well known that reasoning with ontologies poses significant performance issues. The CARE hybrid reasoning mechanism is based on a loose interaction between ontological reasoning and efficient reasoning in a restricted logic programming language. In this paper we illustrate the hybrid reasoning approach adopted by CARE and report the extensive experimental results on ontology-based context reasoning that support our approach.

A prototype of an integrated coordination support system

UTUCS is a system for supporting a group of people (an office, a team, etc.) interconnected through a communication network in handling conversations carried on through different communication media. It has been developed with the aim of providing a good coordination support system that pairs the best computer-based tool a group may have in any situation (dispersed versus non dispersed, synchronous versus non synchronous) with the ability to switch from one to another, maintaining integrated and linked the information it creates. As UTUCS is a general system devoted to integrating conversations independently of the communication media exploited, it has been designed in such a way that it can be enhanced by developing a module for any communication medium that can be effectively supported by a computer network. Up to now the Electronic Mail module, the Face to Face Couple Colloquies module, and the Face to Face Group Meetings module have been implemented.

Design and deployment of community systems: reflections on the Campiello experience

Abstract The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in what technology can do to sustain communities. Within the Campiello project innovative information technologies have been adopted to support the dynamic exchange of experiences among people living in cities with high levels of tourism, in this way reducing the progressive diminishing of identity suffered by the local communities of these cities. The system developed has been used, for an experimental period, in a neighborhood of Venice, Italy. In the paper, we reflect on the whole Campiello experience, considering all its development phases. These reflections are organized as a set of issues that require attention, respectively, in the design and deployment of community systems, illustrated with examples from Campiello. We believe that due to the relative novelty of community systems, this type of reflection is important to inform the design of future systems such that they better fulfill their objectives and become an integral part of community practices.