Activity management as a Web service.

INTRODUCTION

This paper is a companion to "Business activity patterns: A new model for collaborative business applications," which also appears in this issue of the IBM Systems Journal. (1)

Today's tools provide little support for team members working together on a collaborative process. E-mail is the predominant communication tool used today, and it has been overused for purposes other than simple communication, such as exchanging files, scheduling meetings, and archiving data. (2) Using e-mail to manage activities has many drawbacks. For example, it can be difficult to determine the current status of an activity which is managed by e-mail, and if people join an ongoing activity, it can be difficult to bring them up to speed with other team members.

At the other end of the spectrum are formal business-process-workflow systems. These systems direct processes and the people involved in them, but are overly rigid for most everyday business activities. (3,4) A middle ground between e-mail and workflow systems would better suit many collaborative activities.

The goal of the Unified Activity Management (UAM) project at IBM Research is to define a new model for collaborative work based on a shared semantic representation of collaborative activities. (5-7) "Activities" as used here refers to a digital schema-based representation that describes the properties of a collaborative work project and semantically relates the people, artifacts, tools, events, and other elements which are involved in carrying out the project. Examples of activities include organizing a large event or conference, responding to a request for proposals, and resolving a trouble ticket (mechanism used in an organization to detect, report, and resolve a problem). The activity model and how it is used to support business applications is described in depth in a companion paper in this issue. (1)

The UAM approach

The objective of the UAM project (8) is to design a system that supports collaborative work processes, with multiple people coordinating their work in order to accomplish a shared goal. Our work is based on the assumption that there is a great potential benefit in supporting the non-structured aspects of everyday business activities, those that are not managed by workflow processes and existing corporate applications. These kinds of activities are often managed by using handwritten notes, e-mail, telephone conversations, and other informal means. This objective has led to a number of choices in how activities are represented.

First, we believe that activity representations should have semantics and structure. For instance, each activity has a creator, a title, a description, and a set of people involved in its execution, each with a potentially different role (participant, observer, etc.). Activities may have resources associated with them, such as Web pages or word-processing documents; resources may be of different types, such as a reference document or an output of the activity. We hypothesize that formalizing the activity structure explicitly enables the participants in the activity to see how the different parts relate to each other and to more easily track the current status of the activity. In the section "Unified Activity ontology," we describe our representation of activities.

Second, we believe that activities are fundamentally composed of metadata, as opposed to content. Activities serve as the glue that joins individual items of content created and managed in word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail, and Web applications. Rather than reinventing each of these business applications in a new, monolithic application, we take the position that activities should provide a framework for collecting all of these items and presenting them in a single, unified view. As a result, we have developed a model that we call "activities as service": a lightweight Web service infrastructure for creating, managing, and querying activity data. We have used this infrastructure to develop Web-based activity management systems. More important, however, we believe that activity data is most useful when presented within the context of the tools and applications people already use.

This paper describes our representation of activities and presents the Wax system, a Web service framework for activities that leverages a semantic representation of activity. Wax takes advantage of emerging technologies such as lightweight (REST [Representational State Transfer]) Web services, RSS (Rich Site Summary), and the semantic Web to provide access to activity-related data as a service. We present the results we obtained in using the Wax system to manage two large business activities and discuss which features of our design were most helpful to the participants as they used the system.

Related work

Previous approaches to supporting collaborative tasks generally fall within the categories of workflow systems or personal information managers (PIMs).

Formal workflow systems are often rigid and frequently assume fixed roles for users and a fixed pattern for actions. One such system is the Coordinator. (9) These systems are characterized by a rigid specification of the processes to be executed. Furthermore, workflows tend to work as independent entities, having little integration with the rest of the computing environment. A more flexible workflow is described in Reference 10, wherein end users can modify the process. Our system goes even further by dispensing with the process model altogether.

The Task Manager (11) is the earliest system of which we are aware that is based on shared representation of tasks that are malleable and that relate people and resources. A later system that is even closer to our approach in using an early semantic network representation is described in Reference 12.

Shared workspaces provide shared access to documents (such as the Groove system (13) and Lotus * Notes * TeamRooms). These systems tend to be difficult to use for simple, lightweight activities, and it is unclear how they might integrate ad hoc activity with more formal business processes or workflows.

PIMs aim at improving personal productivity by organizing communications, contacts, and events related to an individual. They do not support shared entities, and external interaction is handled through messaging. In contrast, our system is centered around activities and uses them to organize documents, people, and events.

More details about the integration of our system with business processes are described in Reference 1 and Reference 4.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. We begin by introducing a semantic representation of activity, based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), and we describe the ontology used to represent activities and their properties. We then present the Web service APIs (application programming interfaces) that we have defined to provide access to activity data from Web applications and third-party extensions. Next, we present the user interfaces and client plug-ins that we have developed, which let users interact with activities. Finally, we report on the results of two case studies in which the Wax system was used. Our results indicate that the participants found having an activity management system to be extremely useful and confirm our hypothesis that a structured activity representation brings value to activity management. We conclude with a discussion of directions for future work.

EXPLICITLY REPRESENTING ACTIVITIES

The goal of activity management is to help users be more productive by organizing the work they do around the concept of activities. In order to help users manage activities, they must be represented in a consistent way. This representation should capture the essential semantics of an activity: the links, relationships, and resources that differentiate it from other activities.

It is important to distinguish between the typical representation of real-world activities in the minds of the people involved and explicit activity representations. Real-world activities are often implicit (or tacit); people simply perform activities without any representation of them. Real-world activities can also be deliberately driven toward a more or less well-articulated objective, as proposed by Activity Theory. (14) In contrast, real-world activities can also have explicit representations, such as activity descriptions in some medium, for example a plan written on a whiteboard. We propose that explicit computational representations of activities (i.e., representations enabling an activity to be processed with computational tools) are useful for managing them. Explicit representations can be more or less elaborate; it is our intention to support fluid transitions between various levels of elaboration, based on people's estimates of the costs and benefits of creating them.

Explicit activity representations can be formal or informal. Informal representations place no constraints on how the activity is represented; it may be written down as a textual description or may consist of scribbles on a Post-It ** note. The goal of our work is to provide a unified activity representation, which captures the common properties of activities in a standardized representation so that activities can be shared and managed by different systems. In order to achieve this goal, we require activity representations to follow a formal vocabulary, which captures the common characteristics of the activity in a unified representation so that it can be processed with computational tools.