Personal Workflows: Modeling and Management

Abstract

Abstract. As mobile devices are getting powerful, reliable, and inexpensive, more and more personal services have been introduced to individuals via their mobile devices. These services enable users to perform a broad range of activities at any time and anywhere. While a lot of research and development effort has been focusing on extending the scope of activities that can be carried out on mobile devices, little attempt has been made to provide process-oriented services. In this paper, we propose a model for specifying and querying personal processes. This model is equipped with a set of operations that allow mobile users to express queries on their personal processes. Answers of these queries will help mobile users in planning their activities while they are on the move. We have designed and implemented a prototyped personal workflow system on Palm Pilot PDA based on the proposed model. Experiences with this implementation are provided.

Task Memories and Task Forums: A Foundation for Sharing Service-Based Personal Processes

“…The Self-Serv framework [13] features the concept of service communities as a mechanism for integrating a large number of possibly dynamic services. Early work on personal processes [16] focuses on providing modelling notations and operators for querying personal processes. This work focuses specifically on catering for the requirements of travelling users when accessing personal processes.…”

“…These systems offer more simple and ad-hoc information sharing techniques (e.g., free tagging and flexible organization of content) [6]. We argue that applying such easy-and-free style of information sharing to service oriented paradigm would offer tremendous opportunities for automating information management, in particular for the area of managing data from a variety of end-user processes (or referred to as personal processes [16]). Such processes are apparent in office, travel, media, or e-government.…”

PerFlows for the computers of the 21st century

“…For personal workflows, a distributed workflow system with dynamic adaptable processes is needed. A workflow language supporting that is proposed in [4]. Here a definition of a personal process model is given.…”

Modeling Dynamic Context Awareness for Situated Workflows

“…We found two general approaches that enhance workflow modeling with context information: workflows with context integration [3][4][5][6][7] that allow to retrieve and react to context information and personal workflows [8][9][10] that are tailored to the actions of a single human user. The context integration approaches provide modeling mechanisms that allow to specify a context-aware transition conditions between the activities.…”