Victor Onditi

Artefacts as designed, artefacts as used: resources for uncovering activity dynamics

This paper addresses the use of artefacts as a powerful resource for analysis, focusing on the ‘artefact as designed’ as a means of eliciting the designers’ explicit and implicit knowledge and ‘artefacts as used’ as a means of uncovering the trail left by currently inactive processes. Artefact analysis is particularly suitable in situations where direct observation is ineffective, especially in activities that occur infrequently. We demonstrate the usefulness of our technique through the analysis of artefacts within both the office and the meeting environment. This is part of a wider study aimed at understanding the nature of decisions in meetings with the view of producing a tool to aid decision management and hence reduce rework. We conclude by drawing out some general lessons from our analysis, which reaffirms the intricate role that artefacts play in maintaining activity dynamics.

A Faceted Approach to Service Specification

Service-centric computing is developing and maturing rapidly as a paradigm for developing distributed systems. In recent years there has been a rapid growth in the number and types of processes being proposed to support aspects of SOC. Many of these processes require that services be modelled in a particular way and this puts great pressure on traditional notions of service specification, questioning the very nature of how services should be described for potential consumers. We present a technique for addressing this theoretical and practical bottleneck: faceted service specification. This allows different specifications to exist side-by-side if they are needed, yet places little obligation on the service provider to support specifications that are judged to be of little or no value. We show how faceted service specification is being used in the SeCSE project to support advanced service-centric system development activities.

Designing technology with older people

Designing applications to support older people in their own homes is increasing in popularity and necessity. The increase in supporting older people in the community means that cash-strapped resources are required to be utilised in the most effective manner, which often lends itself to technology deployment, rather than human deployment as the former is perceived as more cost effective. Therefore, the concern arises as to how technology can be designed inclusively and acceptably to the people who are to receive it. This paper discusses the issue of design, and how these concerns have been addressed in a series of projects targeted towards directly supporting people in the community.

Software Co-design with Older People

The development of the tablet platform and applications continues, the tablets successfully transmit the writing from one to another in real time and the chat and games applications have been developed to a beta stage. They are currently being tested with participants in their own homes. The technology developed is a direct result of the co-working relationship that the team have built up with the participants. Without them there would be no design, and without them there would be no improvements. Throughout the course of this research we have attempted to work with the participants as equals in the project and reflect their wishes in the final designs. It has been a learning experience for all members of the team. We also see that although the applications have been developed on tablets for tablet PCs there is no reason why we cannot use them on standard computers. Similarly, although the applications were developed for older people by older people, there is no reason why they cannot have as much worth with other people in the wider world.

Migrating to SOAs by Way of Hybrid Systems

A progressive-evolution strategy for migrating systems to service-oriented architectures should minimize the risk to investments in existing software systems while letting businesses exploit the benefits of services. In principle, hybrid systems combine services with nonservice elements. SOAs present a compelling vision for businesses. Conceptually, services bring together a layer of business functionality and a layer of technological implementation.

Specifying and Constructing a Fault-Tolerant Composite Service

This paper proposes a means to specify the semantics of fault tolerant Web services at an abstract level using semantics adapted from queuing system theory. A framework that supports the implementation of specified fault-tolerance is also described. Based on our work, we show how the redundancy and diversity characteristics of a service-oriented system can be expressed and implemented in a Web-service application.

Language Resources and Tools for Supporting the System Engineering Process

This paper discusses an approach to tracking decisions made in meetings from documentation such as minutes and storing them in such a way as to support efficient retrieval. Decisions are intended to inform future actions and activities but over time the decisions and their rationale are often forgotten. Our studies have found that decisions, their rationale and the relationships between decisions are frequently not recorded or often buried deeply in text. Consequently, subsequent decisions are delayed or misinformed. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the preservation of group knowledge invested in the development of systems and a corresponding increase in the technologies used for capturing the information. This results in huge information repositories. However, the existing support for processing the vast amount of information is insufficient. We seek to uncover and track decisions in order to make them readily available for future use, thus reducing rework.

A Framework for Automatic Reconstruction of a Semi-Structured Rationale from a Minutes Document

This paper discusses Tracker, a framework for meeting management. Many meeting support tools and groupware tools now implement the second generation DR protocols characterized by cheap capture and rich multimedia content. Managing such content requires the manual introduction of annotations to support efficient retrieval. However, to do this in a truly useful manner, the capture and management of these documents (decisions rationale) should encompass not only the annotation of the multimedia content for playback, but should support the extraction of relevant information at the level of semantics and pragmatics: i.e. they should be able to automatically extract information such as what subjects were discussed, what decisions were made, what tasks were assigned. We demonstrate how to achieve such an endeavor in this paper.