Collaboration-Oriented Knowledge Management Using Interaction Patterns

The paper starts with analysing the requirements of supporting largely unstructured, collaboration-oriented processes as opposed to highly structured, workflow-based processes. The approach derived from those requirements utilizes the concept of interaction patterns to impose some control and guidance on a collaboration process without reducing the needed flexibility. This not only causes a much greater process transparency but also allows to provide and capture knowledge within the collaboration interactions. The application-specific instantiation of the interaction patterns and their enrichment with integrity constraints is done using a model-driven approach. The resulting application model is also a knowledge artefact which represents an important fragment of domain knowledge.