Awareness Net: A Language for Identification of the
User Interface Design Requirements of
Collaborative Business Process
By: Farhad Daneshgar, PhD

Abstract:

In a previous study an ontological awareness framework was introduced for both representation of collaborative business processes, as well as for identification of the awareness requirements of actors in these processes when supported by collaboration-support systems [9]. In another study the same framework was successfully adopted for identification of the storage requirements of such collaboration-support systems [10]. This article extends these previous works by exploring the capabilities of the awareness framework for identifying the user interface design requirements for collaboration-support systems in an integrated manner. A Sport Virtual Global Forum (VGF) is used for demonstration of the results of the proposed methodology.
Keywords: Awareness; Collaboration; Knowledge Sharing; Groupware; Knowledge Representation; User Interface; 

1. Introduction

Knowledge and database applications in recent years have progressively converged towards integrated technologies, which try to overcome the limits of each single discipline in terms of knowledge and data representations. Research in Knowledge Representation originally concentrated around logic-based formalisms that are typically tuned to deal with relatively small knowledge bases, but provide powerful deduction services, and the language to structure information is highly expressive. In contrast, Information Systems and Database research mainly dealt with efficient storage and retrieval of powerful query languages, and with sharing and displaying large amounts of (multimedia) documents. However, data representations were relatively simple and flat, and reasoning over the structure and the content of the documents played only a minor role [6].

By increasing rate of growth in changing character of databases into knowledge bases the distinction between the requirements in Knowledge Representation and Databases is vanishing rapidly. On the one hand, to be useful in realistic applications, a modern Knowledge Representation system must be able to handle large data sets, and to provide expressive query languages. This suggests that techniques developed in the database area could be useful for knowledge repository systems. On the other hand, the information stored on the web, in digital libraries, and in data warehouses is now very complex and with deep semantic structures, thus requiring more intelligent modelling languages and methodologies, as well as reasoning services on those complex representations before they can support design, management, flexible access, and integration both effectively and efficiently. Therefore, a great call for an integrated logic-based view of Knowledge Representation is emerging [7].

Towards the direction of the above trends, this article revisits an existing modelling language called Awareness Net [9] that was originally used for both representation of collaborative business process, as well as for identification of the awareness and knowledge sharing requirements of collaborating actors in collaborative business processes. This article extends this previous study by exploring potentials of the Awareness Net in identification of an integrated set of user interface design requirements for collaboration-support systems. More specifically, the proposed methodology is a formalised method for constructing private and shared workspaces for group-support systems at conceptual level. Such requirements are also consistent with the knowledge representation and knowledge sharing requirements of these processes.

In the next section a summary background of the Awareness Net is provided followed by a case study in Section 3 that facilitates demonstration of the Awareness Net capabilities in identifying user-interface requirements for group support systems. Section 4 describes in detail the proposed integrated methodology. A brief description of the future work as well as the work in progress is given in section 5.

 2. Background to Awareness Net

The Awareness Net is rooted in the Actor Network Theory (ANT) in the sense that entities, in the form of collaborative semantic concepts, take their form and acquire their attributes as a result of their relation with other entities within the collaborative processes [4, p.3]. It is also a variation of the Petri-net; however, contrary to many available Petri-net-based role interaction models that mainly aid the representation and execution of structured tasks in some way, the proposed language goes few steps further to identify an integrated set of knowledge sharing, storage and user-interface design requirements for collaborative business processes and systems that support these processes.

Figure 1 shows an example of the Awareness Net for the Australian Healthcare process adopted from [5].

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Figure 1: An Example of Awareness Net For Australian Healthcare Process

Discussion: Following is a summary of the list of the semantic concepts used in the Awareness Net of Figure 1. Readers are advised to refer to [9] for full details.

ACTORS: human agents that enact a set of tasks by assuming one or more roles within the process. Within the Awareness Net there is no graphical representation for the ‘actors’; and instead, they are represented indirectly by the relevant role(s) that they play within the process.

ROLE: A set of norms expressed in terms of obligations, privileges, and rights enabling actors to perform certain tasks within the process. In Figure 1 filled circles represent roles.

TASK: An object that is made of a sequence of actions or execution steps that can be planned from the known dependencies in order to achieve a specific process goal. In Figure 1 unfilled circles represent tasks.  

ACTION: A sequence of goal-directed microscopic execution steps that utilise certain resources and/or artefacts for their execution. Within the Awareness Net there is no graphical representation for the actors however they are represented within the process script as embedded attributes of the task object.

COLLABORATIVE TASK:        Is composed of two or more tasks that have a common goal, and (must) share a task artefact (task artefacts are explained later). They are graphically represented by a subset of the awareness net consisting of a pair of related tasks and their common task artefact. In Figure 1 the sub-graph consisting of the objects ‘Lodge Claim’, ‘Claim Form’ and ‘Supply Claim Payment’ represents one example of collaborative task.

ROLE ARTIFACT: This object carries private knowledge/resources on how to perform the actions within a task and are shown by arcs that connect a role vertex to its task vertex. In Figure 1 the ‘Treatment Knowledge’ is a role artefact for the role ‘Medical Provider’.

TASK ARTIFACT: This object carries knowledge about how various actions associated with a collaborative task are executed. Contrary to the role artefacts where they may or may not exist explicitly within the organised knowledge bases, it is assumed here that task artefacts are ideally kept within the organised knowledge bases in order to be shared by multiple actors when performing collaborative tasks. Arcs that connect a pair of task vertices together graphically represent task artefacts. In Figure 1 the ‘Patient Record’ is a task artefacts that is shared by both the Medical Provider and the Patient in order to collaborate in ‘treatment’.

COLLABORATIVE BUSINESS PROCESS (or, Process, for short):

                  This is a set of roles, role artefacts, tasks and task artefacts that are linked together to achieve certain process goals. A process is represented by a connected awareness net. It is formed when at least one collaborative task exists within that process. A collaborative task is created when some of its actions compete with each other in using certain process resources used by other tasks within the process at the same time; hence the concept of task dependency and collaboration. 

 AWARENESS: Is knowledge about the objects that lead an actor to an understanding various aspects of the collaborative process. It is defined by, and measured in terms of, the clusters of the collaborative semantic concepts of the awareness net.

 

3. Case Study: An Awareness Net for Virtual Global Forums

3.1 Virtual Global Forum (VGF) is an offspring of the traditional structured messaging systems introduced in early 1990s by researchers in the field of CSCW. These systems facilitate communication between remote participants at same/different times [3] & [1]. Contrary to its predecessors, today’s VGFs do not rely on time-dependent turn taking floor-control mechanism; and instead, participants initiate communication with, and respond to, others whenever they wish or are able to do so.

Technologically, VGFs are Internet web sites that use the Internet technology embedded within HTML. Like newsgroups, VGFs have discussions that are organised according to topic and subtopic where users can participate. Unlike newsgroups however, VGFs are not catalogued as part of the public Usenet service on the Internet, and therefore the Usenet search engine does not search what is written in a forum. Figure 2 shows an Awareness Net for a Sports VGF that will be used throughout this article.

Three roles have been identified within this forum. These are administrators, registered users, and unregistered users (or visitors) each performing a set of tasks within the virtual community using relevant artefacts. For example, a Registered User interacts with other Registered Users (double arrow line) through the `topic (1)` task artefact, and their task is `interaction through topic (1)`. Another example: in collaboration with the role `Administrator`, the role `Registered User` creates a task artefact called `message (1)` in order to perform the task `create message (1)`. For doing so, the Registered User uses his/her private knowledge in the form of a role artefact, called `Message Knowledge (1)`. The collaborating role, the Administrator, has to process such message creation request, using his/her VGF role artefact called `Administration Knowledge (1)`. As mentioned before, the message itself is the task artefact that was created through a sequence of steps, collaboratively by these two roles. An example of a non-collaborative task is when the Administrator uses his/her technical knowledge to create a hidden topic. Interestingly, this hidden topic will eventually be used as an artefact by one Administrator/Moderator for the collaborative task of ‘interaction through hidden topic’ with other Administrator(s).  

 

 

Figure 2 – Awareness Net for the Sports VGF.

In the next section a new methodology is introduced for translating the awareness net directly into a set of user interface design primitives for VGF.  

4. Transition From Awareness Net to User Interface Design for VGF 

As mentioned before [9], the Awareness Net can be used as (i) a representation tool for collaborative process, and (ii) as a representation tool for awareness requirements of collaborating actors in these process. Both of these attributes can be used in an integrated manner for designing user interfaces for VGF. This means that our primarily focus in designing UI is more on the cooperative process and cooperation among the actors rather than solely on the actors’ behaviour at the interface, or on the flow and transformation of information within the VGF, as is the tradition in non-collaborative, single-user systems. This is particularly relevant to the VGF where people’s interactions can take many forms depending on the purpose of the interaction or the tasks the actors perform. Such approach to user-interface design also provides a unified analysis of both the knowledge-sharing requirements of the collaborating actors as well as the representation of the collaborative process itself. In other words, the same analytical tool can be used for: (i) representation of the users’ awareness requirements, (ii) representation of the collaborative process, and (iii) representation of the semantic layout for the VGF user interfaces, as explained in the following paragraphs.

In Figure 2 three generic roles are identified for this case study. Each role performs some collaborative, and some non-collaborative (private) tasks. The collaborative tasks are performed by two roles/actors. This means that a shared-area on the users` workspace needs to be allocated for this purpose. On the other hand, non-collaborative tasks are performed by an individual role and in isolation from all other (collaborating) actors within the process. The Awareness Net of Figure 2 facilitates design of such user interface as discussion in the following methodology:

a.      A Private Workspace Area (PWA) on the workspace should be allocated for executing non-collaborative tasks that exist on the Awareness Net with various personal information systems and resources (collectively, called ‘role artefacts’ in this article) in order for the actor to execute non-collaborative tasks.

b.      A Shared Workspace Area (SWA) on the workspace should be allocated for executing the collaborative tasks as collaborating users interact with the shared information systems/resources (called ‘task artefacts’ in this article) in order to perform their collaborative tasks. A modified version of the WYSIWIS (What You Se Is What I See) technology can be used for this purpose so that all collaborating users at different times/places can see (records of) relevant collaborative contexts.   

The PWA and SWA are further discussed in the following subsections. 

4.1 Private Workspace Area (PWA) Schema 

A user’s personal desktop area can be used as the user’s PWA with the aim of supporting actor’s access to, as well as interactions with, other private information systems/resources in possession of the actor, in order for the actor to execute non-collaborative tasks. It is recommended that this area be accessible from within the VGF in a seamless manner. Such integration of users’ desktop and VGF workspace will enable users to use all their personal power and tools (eg, MS/PowerPoint and Project Management tools, etc) for performing his/her private tasks within the process. For example, compiling/editing a message for future publication on the VGF (corresponding to the externalisation phase of Nonaka`s Knowledge Sharing cycle [8]) can be possible using the power of MS/WORD.

In the Awareness Net, role artefacts are information, knowledge, and system resources that a role would need in order to perform non-collaborative tasks. According to the existing user interface design paradigms, the responsibility of choosing appropriate role artefacts, their usage patterns, learning/maintenance of these systems have traditionally been given to the users themselves. Such paradigm is still relevant here and the users should continue maintaining their desktop according to their personal preferences. Accordingly, and as expected, PWA is a logical home for users’ non-collaborative task icons. 

4.2 Shared Workspace Area (SWA) Schema 

In current implementations of VGF despite many recent innovative technologies in multimedia web design, not much work has been done in enhancing infrastructural collaboration in VGF; the kind of collaboration that was demonstrated in Figure 2. Awareness refers to a person’s ability to maintain and constantly update a sense of what is going on in the physical and social context, through keeping an eye on what is happening in the periphery of their vision [2]. Such dynamic sense of awareness is necessary for collaborating actors at VGF because the outcome of one person’s task (eg, comments made by a person about some charity organization) may be needed for others to be able to carry out their tasks (eg, to favourably reply to that comment on the basis of a friend` donation). In VGF, such awareness need not be explicit. Use of 3-D sound effects, pictures/video-clips of, or links to, the activity of other collaborating actors and so on can be used in order to keep users aware of other collaborators presence, their tasks, and the VGF resources.

A study of 50 current VGF sites revealed that (i) the awareness provisioning mechanisms for supporting infrastructural collaboration in these forums were quite weak and minimal, and sometimes non-existence; and (ii) majority of the existing infrastructural collaboration support are still handled through a kind of awareness provisioning mechanisms that is most suitable for narrative social mechanism; that is, by sending/receiving/resending text messages back and forth.

Figure 3 shows a proposed workstation for the role `Administrator` with both shared and private areas. As shown in Figure 2 Awareness Net, Administrator collaborates with two roles: ‘Registered Users’, and ‘Unregistered Users’. Administrator also collaborates with other Administrators. The two sticks on the top of the shared area correspond to the ‘Unregistered User’ and ‘Registered User’ whose collaboration contexts are shown by tasks 2 and 3 respectively (task 1 is done in collaboration with other Administrators, hence no stick used). Clicking on any of the three tasks in this area will trigger activation/execution of relevant task artefact, resulting in the collaborating role being aware of the Administrator’s intention in performing such collaboration task. Obviously, various other floor-control models and implementations can be also used to demonstrate such collaboration, and Figure 3 simply shows the user interface conceptually.

The Private area of Figure 3 shows the Administrator’s desktop as s/he normally possess for global usage, PLUS an additional icon indicating the (only) non-collaborative task that the Administrator performs within the VGF process, that is, ‘creating hidden topic’. Clicking this icon will trigger execution/activation of the relevant ‘role artefact’ that Administrator would use to perform this task.