GMD

German National

Research Center for

Information Technology

Innovation

through

Research

Jörg M. Haake

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Applying Collaborative Open Hypermedia Concepts to Extended Enterprise Engineering and Operation

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Overview

• Extended Enterprises (EE)

• Requirements of Engineering and Operating an EE

• Related Work

• Applying a COHS-based Approach

• Conclusions

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Extended Enterprises (EE)

Dynamic Networked Organisation

Extended Enterprise

Resources

• partner organisations combine capabilities and business processes to perform a joint business process

• EE persists after individual project is finished

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Requirements of EE Eng. and Op.

Dynamic Networked Organisation

Extended Enterprise

Resources

• find partners (in EE, outside)

• define cooperation among partners

• execute cooperative activities

• coordinate activities

joint business process:

• heterogeneous information items

• heterogeneous information systems

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Requirements ctd.

Joint business process combines/integrates individual partners’ business processes needs to be cooperatively defined and executed

across organisational boundaries needs to be adapted at run-time (emergent processes!)

Some requirements: Shared representation of joint work plan/work process, partners’ skills

and capabilities, and overall organization

Collaborative access to and manipulation of the shared representation by all partners

Coordination support for executing the joint work process (including enactment of work processes, and adaptation to emergent needs);

Communication support facilitating cooperation among members of distributed teams;

Learning support, which facilitates learning of the work process as well as capturing of best practice examples and debriefing of work process execution.

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Related Work

WFMS• non cooperative; references to work objects only

Shared Workspace Systems (e.g. BSCW)

• focus on asynchronous work; no process support

Shared Hypermedia Workspaces (e.g. HyperDisco, CAOS, Posties)

• focus on asynchronous work; no process support

Cooperative Hypermedia Systems with Process Support (e.g. Kacmar et al., CHIPS)

• process and workspace management support, but not open/extensible

Open Hypermedia Systems (e.g. EUROCODE, Manufaktur)

• open & collaborative workspaces, but no process support

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Applying a COHS-based Approach

provide EE Model: use open hypermedia to represent descriptions of work processes, organizational descriptions (e.g. actors, roles, capabilities) and work objects (e.g. documents) as a nested hypermedia graph

provide a shared repository for the EE model and

enable cooperative access to the shared EE model by all participants via using collaborative open hypermedia concepts

provide open hypermedia clients as cooperative tools for browsing and manipulating the EE model stored in the repository

support enactment of work processes by providing a workflow structure service in the cooperative open hypermedia system (COHS).

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Representing the EE Model

• EE Model is an emergent hyperstructure consisting of• descriptions of work processes• organizational descriptions (e.g. actors,

roles, and capabilities) and• work objects (e.g. documents)

• EE Model components • reside in partners’ organisations• are of heterogeneous nature

• Wrapper concept:• represents an external information

resource as a node• attributes are used to define which

tools can be used to manipulate the content object

• sub typing enables new types of information objects to be added at run-time

EE Model(meta structure)

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Shared EE Model Repository

• provides multi-use access to shared EE Model• standard access interface• asynchronous and synchronous access to its content

• provides common interchange format: XML

• defines common data model: • XML DTD • represents EE common types

Synchronousclient

Asynchronousclient

RMI HTTP

COHS

Shared XML EEmodels

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Cooperative Tools

• clients in the COHS serve as tools for browsing and manipulating the EE model

native clients: Cooperative content editors (e.g. for text, graphics, images),

Cooperative search tool for executing queries on the shared EE model,

Orientation tool for displaying hierarchical overviews on the nested EE model (including group awareness),

Process definition and enactment worktop, which provides an EE portal to the users (offering links to the shared EE model and to tools working on it, including tailoring support).

Integration of legacy tools:

document centric integration: tools are associated with the documents/resources they operate on (like MIME types) via wrapper types

process centric integration: explicit calls to the tools are stored as macro commands (e.g. persistent queries or persistent commands)

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Cooperative Tools ctd.

• External tools integrated in the EXTERNAL EE engineering and operation environment:

SimVision simulation tool for probabilistic simulation of work processes,

METIS visual process modelling tool,

Workware work enactment environment.

Integration: necessary data provided by the shared repository

is specified and the target application is called.

Data is either translated from the repository into the target data format (in the case of the SimVision tool) from the COHS or

Data is extracted by the called tool (in case of METIS and Workware, which can deal with the native XML format).

Integration of non-cooperative tools via NetMeeting COHS creates NetMeeting session with members and tool

Synchronousclient

Asynchronousclient

RMI HTTP

COHS

Shared XML EEmodels

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Support for Process Execution

• EE model uses hypermedia types for representing work processes• COHS Server provides process execution engine as a structure

service to enact work process descriptions

• process browser provided COHS client

• users can at any time use the browser to modify the (so far not enacted) work process description

• changes immediately take effect for continued enactment.

• users can execute the tasks together (e.g. instead of working on a task alone)

Synchronousclient

Asynchronousclient

RMI HTTP

COHS

Shared XML EEmodels

XCHIPSProcess Browser

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• process browser provided as COHS client • overview about structure and current status of the work process• trigger execution

of tasks• browser displays

the documents needed for tasks

• access to tools

• modification of work process description

• users can

execute the tasks together

XCHIPS Process Browser

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Implementation

EE models are stored in the COHS server using XML according to a hypermedia-based XML EE Model DTD

Synchronousclient

Asynchronousclient

RMI HTTP

COHS

Shared XML EEmodelsWeb Resources

Access,CC, execution

different cooperation modes

notifications

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Implementation ctd.

Hypermedia Workspace Toolse.g. Editors, Navigation, Search

Shared Object Model Groupware Components

Hypermedia Workspace Model

Network

Object Mgmt. & Storage Component Mgmt. & Storage

DyCE

DyCE

XCHIPS

COHS-Client

COHSServer

METISvisualmodeller

Workware

SimVision

XML

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Conclusions

• COHS-based solution for supporting engineering and operation of an EE:

• representing EE models as extensible hypermedia graphs in XML• collaboration structure service supporting for synchronous and

asynchronous manipulation of EE models • workflow structure service is provided, which coordinates work in the EE

by enacting the EE model

• Benefits include• maintaining both WF structure and work objects in a unified open

hypermedia workspace: consistency, unified portal• COHS wrappers and tool integration methods enable the integration of

new tools and information resources: run-time extensibility• supports native as well as legacy tools

• Problems include• configuration of the firewalls • coordination of concurrent access to shared repository data from non-

native tools: locking limits concurrent work