Coordination Technology for Collaborative Applications: Organizations, Processes, and Agents (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (1364))

Given the broad popularity of Internet technology, even in its present immature state, and also the recent progress made towards a human-centered view of information technology, the time now seems ripe to essentially extend the scope and power of enterprise information systems. This carefully arranged book concentrates on the relationships between coordination technology and business application requirements and introduces general elements of a cooperative infrastructure allowing for the construction of collaborative applications. It is essential reading for research and development professionals active in the area as well as for IT managers interested in applying this promising new technology in order to remain competitive in the future. A perspective on technology-assisted collaboration....Pages 1-7 Coordination in knowledge-intensive organizations....Pages 9-23 Co-ordination of management activities — Mapping organisational structure to the decision structure....Pages 25-37 A cooperative approach to distributed applications engineering....Pages 39-48 Towards logic programming based coordination in virtual worlds....Pages 49-62 Enhancement of creative aspects of a daily conversation with a topic development agent....Pages 63-76 Coordinating human and computer agents....Pages 77-97 Coordination in workflow management systems — A rule-based approach....Pages 99-119 A framework and mathematical model for collaboration technology....Pages 121-144 Practical experiences and requirements on workflow....Pages 145-160 Coordination science: Challenges and directions....Pages 161-176 Supporting autonomous work and reintegration in collaborative systems....Pages 177-198 Workspace awareness for distributed teams....Pages 199-218 GeM and WeBUSE: Towards a WWW-database interface....Pages 219-230 Post-client/server coordination tools....Pages 231-253 An experimental delay analysis for local audio video streams for desktop collaborations....Pages 255-261 Supporting both client-server and peer-to-peer models in a framework of a distributed object management system....Pages 263-270

Given the broad popularity of Internet technology, even in its present immature state, and also the recent progress made towards a human-centered view of information technology, the time now seems ripe to essentially extend the scope and power of enterprise information systems.
This carefully arranged book concentrates on the relationships between coordination technology and business application requirements and introduces general elements of a cooperative infrastructure allowing for the construction of collaborative applications. It is essential reading for research and development professionals active in the area as well as for IT managers interested in applying this promising new technology in order to remain competitive in the future.

This work provides an overview of co-ordination technology for collaborative applications. It covers organizational co-ordination; agent-based co-ordination; workflow and co-ordination; collaborative work; and technological considerations. The traditional view of information systems is primarily data oriented within the scope of a single enterprise.