Engineering Computer-based Contextual Models for Collaborative Teamwork

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Collaborative teamwork is becoming more common in several domains including healthcare, manufacturing and disaster management. While collaborative teamwork can benefit from information system support, engineering computer-based models to support collaboration is a significant challenge owing to the variations in tasks and people that must be supported, and the different contexts within which collaboration takes place. Collaborative teamwork is not all the same but rather can vary greatly because of context, which I define as ‘the integration of diverse, dynamic, and heterogeneous needs for collaborative teamwork to achieve a specific goal’. Our ability to design information systems to support collaborative teamwork is limited by our inability to incorporate context into requirements engineering and systems design. The overall goal of this proposed research is to develop methodologies for engineering computer based contextual models for collaborative teamwork. Three specific objectives are associated with achieving the overall goal. The first objective is to develop a conceptual model of collaborative contexts using ontological engineering. A systematic literature review will be done to identify collaborative teamwork entities and contexts for the ontology. Activity Theory (AT) will be used to define rules of engagement (i.e. workflows) and to define contradictions that represent points of ambiguity between different entities in collaborative teamwork. Contradictions identify where constraints are needed to mitigate the ambiguity. The AT derived rules of engagement and constraints will define the properties and relationships in the ontology. The second objective is to formalize the ontology into a collaborative system architecture using O-MaSE (Organization-based Multi-agent System Engineering). This engineering method was selected because a collaborative system can be perceived as collection of autonomous entities (agents) interacting according to some rules of engagement in order to achieve a common goal. The third objective is to use Workflows and Agents Development Environment (WADE) and Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) to implement the collaborative system architecture as prototype multi-agent IS application and then to do proof of concept evaluation using case studies from healthcare and disaster management. The proposed research will provide an innovative method for developing information systems to support different contexts of collaborative teamwork.