Supporting Cooperative Activities with Shared Hypermedia Workspaces on the WWW

Team members usually cooperate on a business process by partitioning it into several activities, which in turn generate one or more work items. Work items either need to be processed separately or jointlydependent on the overall context. In addition, joint redefinition of the activity breakdown structure can be necessary while executing activities. Thus, two types of supportflexible workflows as well as cooperation-aware synchronous groupwareare needed to support cooperative activities. However, these two types of cooperative work support are addressed by different technologies. On the one hand, there are workflow management systems supporting the automatic enactment of asynchronous work, and, on the other hand, there are cooperation-aware synchronous groupware systems supporting informal and creative interactions between participants. Our approach extends the WWW with shared hypermedia workspaces, which support joint (re)definition of emerging activity breakdown structures and their flexible collaborative interactive execution.