Towards Comprehensive and Flexible Coordination Support for Cooperative Processes: Software Architectures for Integrating Workflow, Hypermedia and Groupware Services

Efficient cooperation relies on good coordination. Individually, existing workflow, hypermedia, and groupware systems can only manage some types of dependency between activities. Furthermore, these systems provide either formal or informal mechanisms for coordination. We argue that comprehensive and flexible coordination support is needed to manage all types of dependency and to cover the whole spectrum of informal and formal coordination mechanisms. In this paper, possible architectures for integrating workflow, hypermedia and groupware services are analyzed. One promising approach to provide such integrated coordination support is to implement cooperative hypermedia upon a shared information space, and to integrate workflow semantics into cooperative hypermedia. A suitable architecture for such integrated coordination support is identified. A prototype system (CHIPS) based on the architecture is described.