Collaboration management involves capturing the collaboration process, coordinating the activities of the participating applications and humans, and/or providing awareness, i.e. information that is highly relevant to a specific role and situation of a process participant. In this paper, we propose an awareness provisioning solution that allows focusing, customizing, and temporally constraining the awareness delivered to each process participant. Unlike existing collaboration management technologies (such as workflow and groupware) that provide only a few built-in awareness choices, the proposed awareness solution allows the specification of what information is to be given to what users and at what time. To support this advanced level of awareness, we require the definition of awareness roles and the specification of corresponding awareness descriptions. Awareness roles can be dynamically created and associated with any process scope. Awareness descriptions define what information is to be given to users in an awareness role. Since awareness roles are created or become visible when they are needed, the existence of an awareness role also determines the appropriate time interval during which the information specified in the awareness description can be delivered. This awareness provisioning approach minimizes information overloading and allows the combination of process-relevant information with external information as needed by the process participants. The proposed awareness provisioning solution is employed by the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI), a federated system for collaboration process management. In this paper, we introduce an Awareness Model (AM) for creating awareness specifications and defining related execution semantics. Awareness specifications in AM are specialized composite event specifications that define patterns of process-related events and external events, as well as how information should be digested from them. We also describe the implementation of CMI's awareness provisioning engine and related tools.

Processes for crisis mitigation must permit coordination flexibility and dynamic change to empower crisis mitigation coordinators and experts to deal with unexpected situations. However, such mitigation processes must also provide enough structure to prevent chaotic response and increase mitigation effectiveness. Such combination of structure and flexibility cannot be effectively supported by existing workflow or groupware technologies. In this paper, we introduce the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI) and describe its capabilities for supporting crisis mitigation processes. CMI provides a comprehensive Collaboration Management Model (CMM) and a corresponding federated system. CMM supports process templates that provide the initial activities, control and data flow structure, and resources needed to start mitigating a variety of crisis situations. In the event of a crisis, the appropriate process template is selected and instantiated. Crisis mitigation is achieved by escalating the instantiated process template. Escalation involves selecting and adding new process templates, creating new activities, roles, and task forces as needed to deal with the current demands in the crisis, and delegating responsibilities to process participants and task forces. CMM provides advanced composable primitives that empower crisis mitigation coordinators and experts to escalate the process. We provide an overview of the implementation of a federated CMI system and discuss our initial experience with various applications in the area of crisis management.

The Collaboration Management lnfrastructure (CMI) has been developed at MCC to manage collaboration processes in both traditional and virtual enterprises, and to provide combined process and situation awareness. CMI technology development is driven by the requirements of many advanced applications provided by the companies that are members of the consortial CMI project. Such advanced applications include crisis mitigation, command and control, logistics, and service provisioning in virtual enterprises. These applications are not effectively supported by existing workflow and groupware technologies. To address the requirements imposed by these applications CMI provides a sophisticated Collaboration Management Model (CMM) and a corresponding component-oriented system that implements the CMM. CMM draws existing primitives from workflow and groupware models and introduces new primitives that address previously unsupported requirements of the CMI driver applications. In this paper, a crisis mitigation application is presented that involves several process templates which are extended dynamically as details about the crisis become known.

Collaboration management involves capturing the collaboration process, coordinating the activities of the participating applications and humans, and/or providing awareness, i.e., information that is highly relevant to a specific role and situation of a process participant. We propose an awareness provisioning solution that allows customization of the awareness delivered to each process participant. Unlike existing collaboration management technologies (such as workflow and groupware) that provide only a few built-in awareness choices, the proposed awareness solution allows the specification of what information is to be given to what users and at what time. To support this advanced level of awareness, we require the definition of awareness roles and the specification of corresponding awareness descriptions. Awareness roles can be dynamically created and associated with any process scope. Awareness descriptions define what information is to be given to users in an awareness role. Since awareness roles are created or become visible when they are needed, the existence of an awareness role also determines the appropriate time interval during which the information specified in the awareness description can be delivered. This customized awareness provisioning approach minimizes information overloading and allows the combination of process-relevant information with external information as needed by the process participants. The proposed awareness provisioning solution is employed by the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI), a federated system for collaboration process management. Examples from the crisis management domain are presented.

In distributed workflow management systems (WfMSs) many workflow servers and application programs referenced within workflows have to work together cooperatively. We introduce a middleware service for WfMSs which offers qualities for client/server communication. These qualities characterize the behavior of clients and servers in case of failure and recovery. Our middleware service builds an abstraction from the concrete implementation of a client/server interaction and hides characteristics of underlying system services, e.g. RPC mechanisms and TP monitors. For this reason, our middleware service supports the implementation of reliable distributed WfMSs.

Application programs are a substantial asset of an organization. The introduction of workflow management technology must provide means and mechanisms to integrate existing application programs which are not aware of workflow management systems in the same seamless manner as newly written, workflow-aware applications. The paper presents a general approach for integrating workflow-unaware application programs into workflow management systems. Their concepts enable the integration of application programs which are implemented on top of heterogeneous operating systems or base services into our prototype workflow management system MOBILE. Furthermore, they support the execution of several transactional application programs within a single transaction controlled by the workflow management system.

A database system fostering the cooperative usage and modification of a common data pool should provide standard database functionality (e.g. application-independent correctness criteria and data modelling) plus means for a step-wise, cooperative refinement of data over a long period of time. Key ingredients are a hierarchical organization of work, a sound data model covering cooperative uncertainly, and support for long-living cooperative processes. Furthermore, mechanisms for data passing and hiding, negotiation means, and notification are of prominent importance. In the paper, the rationale behind such a functionality is described. Furthermore, a proposal is made for the software architecture of what is called a cooperative database system (CDBMS).