As it has been observed in the recent decade, collaborating teams become ever more unstable, less tightly coupled and more distributed and mobile. Workers participate in multiple teams that pursue different goals that need not be related in any way. This radical way in which the workplace is changing for the individual and the team requires highly adaptable groupware and intelligent support for the individual in order to minimize the time lost for management and coordination when switching between different teams, different workspaces, and different contexts. Thus, a service-oriented approach seems promising to provide individual, context-aware building blocks for adaptable groupware.

In this paper, we present emerging team forms, which are classified into Nimble, Virtual, and Mobile teams. Based on this classification, we present a systematic analysis of specific team characteristics at different views to outline the idiosyncrasies of these heterogeneous team forms. These views are domain independent and highlight team features that can be found in every team however to a varying degree. The five views - Spatial, Organizational, Project, Human Interaction, and Service - help to group related team attributes and serve as a basis for a requirements analysis in collaborative working environments. The derived model places such requirements into four categories: Team Management, Team Interactions, Information in Teams, and Technology Requirements. The inContext platform (part of the European funded research project inContext) accounts for these idiosyncrasies and requirements by applying a service- oriented approach.

In this paper we present the concept of activity-centric collaboration using service-oriented architectures (ACCUSO), which addresses the requirements arising from ad-hoc collaboration in mobile teams. In ACCUSO, activities are used to map human actions to Web services exploiting the potential benefits of SOA, such as service discovery and binding at run time. The possibility to compose activities hierarchically from sub-activities and to redesign running activities provides the process-flexibility required in ad-hoc collaboration. We expand the notion of service orientation by introducing human-provided services (HpS) which provide functionality not realizable through software services. HpS are "implemented" by human actors (possibly being mobile), which remains transparent to the system, thereby allowing for the provisioning of HpS based on conventional WS-infrastructure. The feasibility and applicability of ACCUSO is demonstrated through a proof-of-concept implementation.

Recovering and analysis of workflows executed in Service-Oriented Systems (SOS) can be expected to gain more and more relevance in service-oriented information technology in the not so distant future. Our work attempts to perform workflow mining in logs provided by service-oriented architectures. Firstly, we introduce the idea of Web Services Interaction Mining (WSIM) and give an overview of related fields of research. Secondly, we propose a classification of SOS according to the log information they provide and analyse mining opportunities in the respective classes. To illustrate the potential of WSIM, we describe a complete workflow mining cycle in a SOS of very rich log information. Since such rich logs are often not available, we then direct our attention to mining in limited logs. We present our first steps towards a workflow mining algorithm, specifically tailored to Web Services (WS). We conclude with a discussion of open issues and future work.

With the ever growing importance of the service-oriented paradigm in system architectures more and more (business) processes will be executed using service-oriented systems. Therefore, we believe that the ability to discover processes in loosely-coupled systems is essential in system optimization. Firstly, we briefly describe our previously introduced idea of Web Services Interaction Mining (WSIM) and then direct our attention on mining for workflows in logs provided by SOA. We thoroughly examine strategies in other fields of mining for their applicability in SOA. After that, we discuss logging possibilities in service-oriented systems and analyze mining opportunities with regards to the provided logs. As a case study we present a service-oriented system and its logging features. We conclude with a demonstration of how we successfully applied existing process mining strategies on this system’s logs and present the results of that mining in the form of workflow models.

In collaborative working environments (CWE), human interaction patterns represent reoccurring situations describing the sequence and type of interactions between individuals. We believe that such patterns provide information that may be used to improve human collaboration. In this paper we introduce interaction patterns to an existing context sharing platform used by distributed teams. We use these patterns to formulate rules that help determining the relevance of context information between users and that raise team awareness between interacting entities. These rules are integrated in an existing platform for context sharing between mobile users which allows us to demonstrate the practical applicability of our approach

Nowadays, Web service technology plays an increasing role in internet applications, in general, and e-commerce applications, in particular. In fact, service-oriented systems can be expected to grow larger in complexity. Such large systems demand for tools that allow for analyzing and monitoring of service-oriented systems in use. Our work attempts to draw the necessary architecture in order to analyze interactions between Web service consumer and provider. WSIM modelling architecture is built over three layers : Web service operations, interactions and workflows. The paper aim is to present WSIM modelling architecture and how it could be implemented to support existing Web service applications (e.g. e-commerce applications). Key-words: e-Commerce Services, Web service interactions, Web service logging, Web service mining

As Web services play a more and more important role in information technology, service-oriented systems can also be expected to grow larger in complexity. Such large systems demand for tools that allow for analyzing and monitoring of service-oriented systems in use. Our work attempts to apply data mining and process mining to Web services and their interactions in order to provide a means to analyze interactions between Web service consumer and provider. Firstly, we clarify the term of Web Services Interaction Mining (WSIM) and present three levels of abstraction on which WSIM could be performed: Web service operations, interactions and workflows. Then we outline some of the problems Web Services Interaction Mining (WSIM) could solve. Thirdly, we evaluate how WSIM could be done on these three levels and present a specification for Web service log records. We also discuss how these log records could be obtained using existing tools. We conclude the paper with suggestions on how to develop Web services which can be mined on all three levels of abstraction.