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Hypertext to Knowledge to Workflow Roy Rada, Antonios Michailidis, Christian Frosch*, Ming
Lei**
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AbstractThe engineering hypothesis is that a hypertext-like, collaborative authoring system can provide an appropriate infrastructure for a knowledge and workflow management system. A hierarchical, hypertext infrastructure with typed, multi-attributed nodes provides the platform. People perform their scheduled activities by creating nodes in the system and they comment on one another’s work. Such a system has been designed and built, as documented here. The engineering result suggests new issues for the design of the next generation of the system. The experimental hypothesis is that people will use such a system to manage knowledge and work. Knowledge management has been successfully supported in a software engineering team. Workflow management was only partly supported for these software engineers in part because they often relied on informal working methods that did not match well the scheduling capabilities of the system.Figures
Figure 1. Knowledge conversion life-cycle Figure 2. (a) Role hierarchy and an objective node that rolex has the opportunity to assign to subordinate role(s). (b) "Scheduling": Rolex has created a schedule for role x,2, …., role x,n. This involves first connecting an objective with some subordinate roles and associating a deadline with them. This is then stored as a schedule node for each role. (c) An agent in any role x,2, …., role x,n may respond to the assigned objective by creating a progress report or comment. The supervisor role may also comment on that agent’s response. Figure 3. Client-server architecture: any number of users interact directly with the Internet Information Server (IIS) via Web browsers. The Active Server Pages on the IIS communicate with the SQL Server. Figure 4. “Enter role”: the user has unfolded the role hierarchy on the left and selected the role of ‘Software Engineer’ on the left and is attempting to enter in that role by selecting userid and entering password. Figure 5. Software engineer adds blob: the software engineer was scheduled to produce a node and is in the process of doing that. The first blanks of the form are shown here. At the bottom of this form the email option would appear. Figure 6. The teacher is in the IFSM 298 role. Seven teams were created to report to the teacher during the running of the course. Figure 7. The IFSM 298 syllabus was stored as a Microsoft Word document, module.doc. The nodes indented underneath ‘syllabus’ are the updates that were issued from day to day.
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