The Ariadne Project

Synopsis

Computer-based support for hybrid, collaborative office processes

Summary

The Ariadne project investigates computer support for hybrid collaborative office-processes, i.e. complex information processing activities that involve coordinated contributions by multiple people and computer systems. The goal is to develop a unified model that captures both structured administrative processes and semi-structured, ad-hoc activities, and to design and implement a flexible, generic and distributed environment that can support this diversity of activities.

Activities

We have studied the use of functional parsers to model office processes. An extended version of the Gofer programs described in references [8,9] below is available on-line .

The language for the description of Ariadne processes (called HOPLa) is gradually being refined based on the original proposal by Timo Besamusca. For a good - and fairly up-to-date - overview of HOPLa and the ongoing work on Ariadne, see reference 11, which is available on line as Postscript. Note that this is a Macintosh postscript file that could cause some problems when trying to print it. Contact me if you have problems reading it; I will try to produce a more "reliable" version.

This paper also describes some of the things that been implemented in two prototypes of Ariadne that have been developed by Danny Greefhorst (one in Gofer, one in C++). Danny's thesis discusses HOPLa and the implementation and is now available on-line, in compressed Postscript format. In the mean time the prototype has been ported to Java and development is continuing. I hope to make the prototype available soon.

Anja Hettinga has worked on process management. This is the functionality that allows end-users to manage processes and to deal with and plan resource allocation requests. A key issue is to analyze the effects of certain allocations on the future performing of a potentially large collection of processes. Anja has created an abstract model for processes, resources and allocation (coded in Gofer) and a simulation tool in Smalltalk.

Harm Kolenbrander has been working on process-enactment. Our goal is to allow users of Ariadne to specify different process enactment policies, by means of tailorable event-specifications that invoke different kinds of event-handlers. The event specifications are represented again as HOPLa terms.

Keywords

office systems, workflow management, computer-supported cooperative work, groupware, process modelling, coordination languages.

Contact

Gert Florijn (florijn@serc.nl), Doaitse Swierstra (doaitse@cs.uu.nl)

References

  1. Wim van Asch: James - A Journalizing Administrative Message Exchange System, Afstudeerverslag Universiteit Utrecht, Vakgroep Informatica, augustus 1992.
  2. Benno Boerboom: Primitiva voor het modelleren van samenwerkingsprocessen, Afstudeerscriptie Universiteit Utrecht, Vakgroep Informatica, februari 1994.
  3. Hans van Keulen en Jan Verhoeven: Dynamiek in Dossiers, Afstudeerverslag Open Universiteit, februari 1994.
  4. Gert Florijn: Ariadne - Supporting Hybrid Office Processes, Working Paper, Universiteit Utrecht, Vakgroep Informatica, 1994.
  5. Gert Florijn, Benno Boerboom: Modelling Constructs for Hybrid Office Processes Working Paper, Universiteit Utrecht, Vakgroep Informatica, 1994.
  6. Gert Florijn: Coordinating Hybrid Office Processes, Submission to the 1994 ECOOP Workshop on Coordination Models and Languages, may 1994. HTML-version
  7. Gert Florijn: Workflow Management - a Limited View of Office Processes, Position paper for the CSCW'94 Workshop on Workflow Management and Office Information Systems, September 1994. HTML-version
  8. Gert Florijn: Modelling Office Processes with Functional Parsers, Technical Report UU-CS-1994-50, November 1994. HTML-version
  9. Timo Besamusca: Defining a Coordination Language for Hybrid Office Processes, Utrecht University, Dept. of Computer Science, INF/SCR-95-08
  10. Gert Florijn: Object Protocols as Functional Parsers, Proceedings ECOOP'95, Walter Olthoff (Ed), Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 952, Aarhus, Denmark, august 1995.
  11. Gert Florijn, Timo Besamusca, Danny Greefhorst, Ariadne and HOPLa: flexible coordination of collaborative processes, november 1995, submitted for publication. Postscript version
  12. Danny Greefhorst: A simulation environment for Ariadne, Utrecht University, Dept. of Computer Science, INF/SCR-96-03. Compressed Postscript version
  13. Gert Florijn, Timo Besamusca, Danny Greefhorst, Ariadne and HOPLa: flexible coordination of collaborative processes, proceedings of Coordination'96, Cesena, Italy, April 1996, Springer Verlag, LNCS 1061.
  14. Anja Hettinga: Op weg naar een betere samenwerking in administratieve organisaties, master's thesis, Open University, May 1996.

Last modified: 08/04/99