Innovation
through
Research
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GMD
German National
Research Center for
Information Technology
Applying Collaborative
Open Hypermedia Concepts
to Extended Enterprise
Engineering and Operation
Jörg M. Haake
Overview
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• Extended Enterprises (EE)
• Requirements of Engineering and Operating an EE
• Related Work
• Applying a COHS-based Approach
• Conclusions
Extended Enterprises (EE)
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Dynamic Networked Organisation
• partner organisations combine
capabilities and business processes
to perform a joint business process
• EE persists after individual project
is finished
Resources
Extended Enterprise
Requirements of EE Eng. and Op.
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Dynamic Networked Organisation
Resources
Extended Enterprise
• find partners (in EE, outside)
• define cooperation among partners
• execute cooperative activities
• coordinate activities
joint business process:
• heterogeneous information
items
• heterogeneous information
systems
Requirements ctd.
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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.
Related Work
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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
Applying a COHS-based Approach
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 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).
Representing the EE Model
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• 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)
Shared EE Model Repository
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• provides multi-use access to shared EE Model
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• 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
Synchronous
client
Asynchronous
client
RMI
HTTP
COHS
Shared XML EE
models
Cooperative Tools
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• clients in the COHS serve as tools for browsing
and manipulating the EE model
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 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)
Cooperative Tools ctd.
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• External tools integrated in the EXTERNAL EESynchronous
engineering and operation environment:
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 SimVision simulation tool for probabilistic
simulation of work processes,
Asynchronous
client
client
RMI
HTTP
 METIS visual process modelling tool,
 Workware work enactment environment.

Integration:
 necessary data provided by the shared repository
COHS
Shared XML EE
models
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
Support for Process Execution
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• EE model uses hypermedia types for representing work processes
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• 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)
XCHIPS
Process
Browser
Synchronous
client
Asynchronous
client
RMI
HTTP
COHS
Shared XML EE
models
XCHIPS Process 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
Implementation
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different cooperation modes
Asynchronous
client
Synchronous
client
notifications
HTTP
RMI
Access,
CC,
execution
Web Resources
COHS
Shared XML EE
models
EE models are stored in the COHS server using XML according to
a hypermedia-based XML EE Model DTD
Implementation ctd.
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XCHIPS
Hypermedia Workspace Tools
e.g. Editors, Navigation, Search
METIS
visual
modeller
Workware
SimVision
COHSClient
Hypermedia Workspace Model
Shared Object Model
Groupware Components
DyCE
Network
Object Mgmt. & Storage
Component Mgmt. & Storage
DyCE
COHS
Server
XML
Conclusions
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www.ipsi.gmd.de
• 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 nonnative tools: locking limits concurrent work