Frontiers in ICT

Preface

Life without World Wide Web has become unthinkable, much like life without electricity or water supply. We rely on web to check public transport ­schedules, buy a ticket for a concert or exchange photos with friends. However, many everyday tasks cannot be accomplished by the computer itself, since the websites are designed to be read by people, not machines. In addition, the online information is often unstructured and poorly organized, leaving the user with tedious work of searching and filtering. This book takes us to the frontiers of the emerging Web 3.0 or Semantic Web - a new generation of web aimed at bridging this gap and making the web experience accessible and easy. The Semantic Web is a vision of online information that can be readily interpreted and analyzed by machines, adapting it to users’ needs and abilities.

Semantic annotation of best-practices

Angelo Di Iorio, Davide Rossi, Fabio Vitali
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
University of Bologna, Italy

Abstract

WikiRecPlay is a tool to record/replay/share/recommend sequences of interaction steps between users and web applications. It has been designed to support the sharing and automating of (part of) organizational best practices, that are unstructured, emergent processes that characterize knowledge-intensive tasks within organizations. WikiRecPlay is implemented as an extension to the Firefox web browser and uses a wiki as a back-end to store/retrieve sequences of interaction. The social dimension of the wiki promotes the ­sharing of knowledge between members of the organization but most of the know-how sharing with WikiRecPlay takes place via the integrated recommender that is used to suggest the available sequences stored in the wiki that have as starting point the web page that users are visiting. They can then browse the wiki page for a suggested sequence in order to obtain knowledge from other users or can enact one of the sequences that is automatically executed on their behalf. However, sequences stored in the wiki, even if they start from the same web page, can refer to different practice, can be sub-optimal or can be outdated. In this paper we study how to leverage on semantic wiki extensions in order to improve the quality of WikiRecPlay’s recommender trying to overcome the aforementioned issues.

Keywords Semantic Wikis, Enterprise Know-how, Web Replay, Knowledge sharing, WikiRecPlay

1 Introduction

Processes, as usually intended by the Business Process Management (BPM) discipline, are structured entities for which a model exist (Aldin and de ­Cesare, 2001). Most of the BPM activities revolve around process models: process design, simulation, monitoring, enactment, etc. We call these processes structured processes, referring to the fact that they adhere to a well defined structure represented in a process behaviour language or notation. In (Rossi and Vitali, 2009) we discussed how social software, by letting users freely interact, supports emergent coordination scenarios, where process are dynamically refined by the actors without being enforced to obey to a predefined process model. ← 11 | 12 → In this context the business processes become more dynamic, flexible (and less defined) entities that we call organizational best practices, highlighting the fact that they are the result of refinements embodying the ­organization’s know-how.

This concept has been reiterated and refined, over the last few years, by other researchers as well, and has many contact points with the concepts behind adaptive case management. In (Bohringer, 2011), for example, the concept of emergent case management is introduced along with a solution based on social software tools like microblogs. The case management paradigm is also the framework for handling dynamic processes with social software tools presented in (Bider et al., 2011) and for works such as (Rychkova and Nurcan, 2011) in which is presented a BPMN extension to cope with this less structured framework, an effort to find a common ground between structured and emergent processes.

WikiRecPlay is a tool (implemented as an extension to the Firefox web browser) that has been designed to support recording/replaying/sharing/recommending sequences of interaction steps representing parts of best practices in a context in which individuals from an organization adopt social software tools deployed as software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms1.

By publishing and processing information in blogs, microblogs, wiki, forums; by using tagging services; by collaboratively editing documents the users reach organizational goals following sequences of activities that have been refined in previous interactions.

This how-to knowledge in WikiRecPlay is captured in the form of sequences of interactions that can be used as a documentation or can be enacted on the behalf of the user. To make this sharing as effective as possible WikiRecPlay integrates a recommender system that suggests to the users the interaction sequences (stored in the wiki) to which they can be interested in. A recommender, however, is just as good as it is the ability of the user to take advantage of it. The original recommender integrated byWikiRecPlay is a very naïve one: the sequences suggested to the users are all and only those whose start page corresponds to the page they are visiting; moreover only the name and a brief author-edited description are available to characterize them. This behaviour is sub-optimal for various reasons: (i) for the very same page it is possible that multiple sequences, dealing with very different practices, are available; (ii) a sequence can be outdated (e.g. because the ← 12 | 13 → web application it refers to has been changed); (iii) no information is available on how to choose among ­different sequences that have similar names/descriptions (suggestion from other users and a reputation metric associated to the author could be useful).

The aim of the work presented in this paper is trying to overcome the aforementioned limits of the current proposal by adding a social dimension to the sequences stored in the wiki and let this kind of information emerge from the recommender. The structure of this presentation is as follows. Section 2 presents WikiRecPlay and its design goals, and provides a little details on its implementation. Section 3 introduces the semantic wiki extension that we propose to improve the social dimension of WikiRecPlay and its recommender. In section 4 we conclude and discuss our approach, in comparison to similar works.

2 WikiRecPlay: design goals, usage and implementation

WikiRecPlay is a Firefox extension that allows users to record and re-play sequences of web activities (interactions with web sites using a browser). The way users perform such activities has been subject to changes in the recent past: web applications are getting more interactive, ubiquitous and easy to use; the social dimension has become crucial: different users – with different skills and tools – share content easily and complete tasks together, in a new and spontaneous way. From a technical perspective, monolithic server-side applications are being replaced by Ajax-based ones that load and manipulate (pieces of) content client-side. WikiRecPlay has been designed to support users in automating web interactions within this context.

In order to define what we wanted from WikiRecPlay we selected a number of test cases build around known web applications2: GoogleDocs for its very sophisticated interface and Ajax-based machinery; MediaWiki and WordPress for their relevance as social software tools; PizzaBo and JqueryUI for the large amount of highly dynamic client-side code.