A document-centric approach to open collaboration processes

Abstract

Individuals collaborate with each other in groups in order to solve complex tasks or to jointly develop new solutions. The Web offers them a huge amount of data, information and services to be used as input to their collaboration. In our research we examine such creative and emergent open collaboration processes and their relationship to documents as a communication and collaboration vehicle. Our goal is to better support coordination and integration in such collaborations. From a technological perspective, we aim to support open collaborations by putting a service-oriented document model and middleware in the center of a collaboration. As a first step, we provide a concrete design of a document collaboration system representing documents as rule-based mashups of RESTful services provided by humans, enterprise systems or the Web. As a second step, we aim to analyze communication of resources in open collaboration processes. We strive to use this analysis data in order to a) provide end-users of our collaboration system with a visual method in order to help them understanding the evolution of their document collaboration ecosystem and processes and to b) allow detecting potential inconsistencies in rule-based process definitions which can be caused by the open ecosystem of resources. In this paper we give a short overview of the current state of our research and outline future research directions. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.