Representing and Supporting Coordination

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The goal of this project is to develop knowledge-based environments for supporting group coordination. The PI builds on his earlier experience with the Information Lens (an intelligent system that helps people find, filter, and sort electronic messages) in developing more powerful and flexible tools to support a wide variety of coordination processes. The research builds on a prototype system. The new work will integrate many of the important features of (a) object-oriented databases, (b) hypertext, (c) electronic messaging, and (d) intelligent rule-based agents. The system will allow unsophisticated computer users to create or modify their own cooperative work applications using three key primitives: semistructured objects, customizable folders, and semiautonomous agents. The researchers experiment with a variety of applications in this environment such as: (a) intelligent tracking of tasks for project management, (b) managing design changes in engineering groups, (c) group decision making, and (d) collaborative authoring. In developing these applications, the existing prototype will be augmented with more knowledge of objects, more knowledge of processes, and more kinds of agents. The significance of this work is in making electronic mail systems more flexible and easier to use. It is especially promising for alleviating the burden of managing large electronic mail files by organizing and prioritizing messages.