Event-driven adaptive collaboration using semantically-enriched patterns

Collaboration is essential for value creation in the modern business environment, may span across organizational and geographical boundaries and is often used for mission critical tasks. Collaborative environments are subject to continuous changes because participation is dynamic and business goals may be evolving. In such dynamic environments there is a need for adapting the ways of collaboration to reflect the current conditions. By focusing on collaboration in dynamic environments, we explore the utilization of collaboration patterns as models for recurring high-value collaborative tasks, which can be intelligently identified, retrieved and enacted when needed. In this paper, we propose Collaboration Pattern Assistant, an information system which is built around the concept of collaboration patterns and is based on an innovative coupling of ontologies with an event driven architecture. The advantages of using ontologies to represent collaboration patterns lie in their ability to model effectively related concepts and interrelations, to map to collaboration services provided by different suppliers, to use reasoning to check values for validity and consistency, as well as to derive new facts based on the existing ones. The adoption of an event driven architecture enables collaboration support which can respond to continuously changing circumstances by processing effectively and reacting to events generated by on-going collaborations. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.