Collaboration support for knowledge-intensive processes through a service-based approach

Business Process-Oriented Knowledge Management approaches in organizations are beginning to focus on processes that involve intense generation, use and dynamic conversion of knowledge during their execution, so-called Knowledge-Intensive Processes (KIP). In those scenarios, the collaboration among participants is fundamental. However, the computational support for this collaboration is not adequate, due to the lack of methodologies and tools. This work proposes XcuteKIP, a service-oriented approach for collaboration support in KIP that encompasses a method and a supporting tool. The method is composed by two phases: at design time, collaboration services are automatically recommended based on the KIP model; at runtime, the recommended services are composed and instantiated so as to provide a groupware support for the KIP execution. The architecture of the XcuteKIP tool is specified and implemented on top of WGWSOA, a service-based infrastructure to support the development and execution of collaborative applications.