Role-based collaboration

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Collaborative systems are tools which support people to collaborate. They should not only support virtual face-to-face collaboration among people at a distance but also improve face-to-face collaboration by providing more mechanisms to overcome its inherent drawbacks. Meanwhile, roles are difficult concepts and mechanisms. In applications, roles seem to be phantoms. They are everywhere and every explanation seems reasonable, but it is difficult to grasp, identify, and completely specify them. Therefore, introducing roles into collaborative systems is very important, challenging and exciting. Role-based collaboration is one such innovation that organizes collaboration by providing role specification, assignment, transition and negotiation mechanisms. The basic modeling idea is that a role can be stored, retrieved and manipulated with a structure composed of a service interface including incoming messages or message patterns and a request interface including outgoing messages or message patterns. A role is specified with the help of other components such as objects, classes, agents, environments and groups. Our long-term objective is to develop a formal model, an applicable infrastructure and a platform for building large collaborative systems such as virtual teams, virtual groups, virtual companies, and virtual organizations based on large networked computer systems. Our short-term research focuses on the provision of a model / a methodology of collaboration; and an infrastructure / a platform to define, specify and negotiate roles. Based on these, we will implement a role-based group support system. Our basic research methodology is experimental with a roadmap of formalizing, simulation, implementation, application, feedback and modification. A prototype platform will be built to support new collaborative applications such as software engineering, personalized user interface and production management. Practical applications will demonstrate the value of this research.