Hypertext to Knowledge to Workflow

Abstract

The engineering hypothesis is that a hypertext-like, collaborative authoring system can provide an appropriate infrastructure for a knowledge and workflow management system. A hierarchical, hypertext infrastructure with typed, multi-attributed nodes provides the platform. People perform their scheduled activities by creating nodes in the system and they comment on one another's work. Such a system has been designed and built, as documented here. The engineering result suggests new issues for the design of the next generation of the system. The experimental hypothesis is that people will use such a system to manage knowledge and work. Knowledge management has been successfully supported in a software engineering team. Workflow management was only partly supported for these software engineers in part because they often relied on informal working methods that did not match well the scheduling capabilities of the system.