Hyper-Agenda: A System to Organize and Realize Tasks

This paper presents the Hyper-Agenda project whose main aim is to model a system in order to help the organisation and realisation of Tasks which can be applied in an office environment. Two tools that translate the main functionalities of our system are defined: the Agenda tool which permits the organisation of Tasks in the Hyper-Agenda environment, the Interpretation tool which helps users to achieve their Tasks. The main concepts of this system are discussed and argued: Entities, Groups, Tasks and Agendas. The key concept of our study is the Task, which allows the modelling of an employees activities within an organisation.Hyper-Agenda allows the user: (1) to express the model of his Tasks; (2) to instanciatc these models in order to achieve real Tasks (3) to plan instances of Tasks into Agendas and (4) to follow their execution. We show that the modelling of Tasks demands tree-like complex objects and that the structuring of entities leads to the point of view notion, Finally, we show that Agendas are derived objects very close to the database view concept. The general expression of constraints and the temporal aspects that allows planning are briefly discussed. A formal specification language to precisely determine the properties of each concept and the functionalities of our system is presented. We conclude the present article giving a brief description of the first prototype developed and outline the future work in this area.