A novel approach to modeling context-aware and social collaboration processes

Abstract

Companies strive to retain the knowledge about their business processes by modeling them. However, non-routine people-intensive processes, such as distributed collaboration, are hard to model due to their unpredictable nature. Often such processes involve advanced activities, such as discovery of socially coherent teams or unbiased experts, or complex coordination towards reaching a consensus. Modeling such activities requires an expressive formal representation of process context, i.e. related actors and artifacts. Existing modeling approaches do not provide the necessary level of expressiveness to capture it. We therefore propose a novel modeling approach and a graphical notation, demonstrate their applicability and expressivity via several use cases, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.