Knowledge-based Office Automation and Cscw

The cooperative aspect of office work entails developing OIS systems which support office tasks that have to be executed in a collaborative manner. In particular, many systems have been developed using speech act elements as the theoretical underpinnings. Instead of using speech act elements, we USe operators (e.g., send, request and acknowledge) as basic building blocks. We have developed a knowledge-based system called AMS (Activity Management System) that is specifically tailored to support CSCW. The system embodies the syntax and operational semantics of the various office operators. These operators can then be concatenated in the same manner as speech act elements to support CSCW.