Jussi Stader

I-Room: A Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction

The I-Room is a virtual environment intended to support a range of collaborative activities, especially those that involve sense making, deliberation, and decision making. The I-Room case studies described in this paper all employ virtual worlds technology to provide this interaction space and show how this can be augmented with external knowledge-based and intelligent systems.

Capability Modelling and Knowledge Management

Organisations are realising how important it is to “know who knows what” and be able to make maximum use of the knowledge. The field of knowledge management is concerned with this issue. AIAI has been involved in the area of knowledge management for some time. AIAI has also been working on ontologies and — in particular — capability ontologies in the context of workflow systems, and is now applying knowledge management techniques to make additional use of the capability ontologies in knowledge management. A software system for supporting capability management, based on a capability ontology and other, well defined specifications, can help an organisation to align the skills of current and future employees with the strategic business objectives.

Formal Support for an Informal Business Modelling Method

Originally published in the International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Feb 2000.

Combining and adapting process patterns for flexible workflow

To provide intelligent process management support in complex engineering domains, considerable advances in the flexibility of current workflow systems are necessary. We describe an approach to developing such flexibility based on the capture of process patterns within a particular domain, and the dynamic composition of such patterns to determine the structure of an overall process. The role of a formal ontology of the domain in maintaining internal consistency of processes being managed in this way is emphasized.

Bags and viewers: a metaphor for structuring a database browser

The creative work of experts in many fields is increasingly coming to involve data held on computers. Conventional database query systems require precise knowledge of the structure of the database and of a query language such as SQL (Date 1989). Many experts who could benefit from using on-line data neither have, nor wish to acquire, substantial computer skills. Interfaces that allow data to be retrieved without such knowledge-e.g. based on “forms” (ORACLE 1986)-generally involve anticipating the user’s data needs. However, the data creative domain experts require at any moment, may depend on their interpretation of the data they have already retrieved, making very flexible but powerful query mechanisms essential.

Bags and Viewers: A Metaphor for Intelligent Database Access

We present a way of structuring a database query system to form a bridge between current data handling systems and the data requirements of creative work. The interface is based around specifying the contents of “bags” of objects and inspecting them using “viewers”, which can then be used to launch further queries.

Intelligent software support for business process change

In recent years, many organisations have found enterprise modelling, and particularly business process modelling, to be an effective tool for managing organisational change - both for developing an understanding of the organisation as it currently exists and for planning change in the organisation. The process models developed, however, tend to be used only for reference during business operations and the reengineering activity, rather than as a resource which can be actively used to support the day-to-day execution of the organisations processes. While workflow systems do use process models in this way, current systems can only handle simple, predictable processes, not the dynamically changing, complex and unpredictable processes for which many organisations require support. The TBPM project extends the application scope of current workflow systems to more complex and flexible business processes by incorporating into the software system knowledge about the processes and their organisational context, in the form of enterprise models. Used in conjunction with a management approach which permits the specification, planing, and enactment of processes to be interleaved, the models provide the basis for TBPMs adaptive workflow support for complex business processes. The TBPM project is a collaborative project between AIAI, the University of Edinburgh and the Computer Science Department at Loughborough University. ICI and Unilever are industrial partners on the project, providing real business requirements and an application scenario from the chemical process industries. This scenario, taken from the area of new product development, illustrates the mechanisms and benefits of the approach adopted.

Harnessing AT technologies to meet the requirements of adaptive workflow systems

In this paper we describe how we are exploiting AI technologies to infuse workflow systems with adaptive capabilities. This work is part of an ongoing applied research programme between AIAI and a number of industrial and academic partners. We begin by presenting the requirements of adaptive workflow within a taxonomy consisting of the layers of domain, process, agents, organisation, and infrastructure. We then show how each level can be substantially addressed with AI technologies. We conclude by identifying important challenges for further work as being the improvement of rationale capture and the support for the evolution of the process models that underlie executing processes.