Authors: Mizuho Iwaihara, Sozo Inoue
Tags: 1998, conceptual modeling
In a collaborative working environment, process automation is necessary in the sense that (a) to show a flow of work items to be done, which is particularly important for assisting complex human tasks, (b) to show current status of each task to other participants, such as announcing which task is completed or continuing. More advanced functionalities which current process automation systems lack are: (c) support for ad-hoc and/or unstructured tasks such as discussions, decision making, and (d) collaboration of different teams, in which participants may not share all the process information, especially when carrying out negotiations. These requirements are universal to any types of collaborative work environments. In this paper, we propose a new model for management of process information through message communication, as a basis for solving the above requirements. In our model, messages, such as E-mails or primitive user actions, are basic elements of our model, and message groups (m-groups) are introduced to compose a hierarchical structure on messages. We show a method for process automation through m-group templates, and discuss adding transactional properties to m-groups.Read the full paper here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-49121-7_35
