FlowWiki: A wiki based platform for ad hoc collaborative workflows

Abstract

Traditional workflow management systems provide rich capabilities for designing, executing, and monitoring well-defined collaborative processes. Yet, for many occasions of collaboration, we do not often have sufficient information about who will participate, what activities people will carry out, and how the entire workflow will change. Accordingly, the problem of managing flexible workflows has been receiving increasing attention during the last decade. This paper presents a novel approach by which collaborative workflows can be configured independently as needed by participants and managed in an ad hoc way. Motivated by the emerging paradigm of collective intelligence, the proposed platform, named FlowWiki, provides a set of useful mechanisms to enable dynamic collaborations without requiring prescribed collaboration model. FlowWiki is an extension of conventional wiki system, and it aims for flexibly managing collaborative workflows by allowing on-demand workflow configuration and event-driven interactions. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.