Technology Profile: I-X Process Panels

Web homepage: http://i-x.info and http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/

Developers: Austin Tate, Jeff Dalton, Jussi Stader, Jessica Chen-Burger and Stephen Potter.

Owner: AIAI, The University of Edinburgh.

Addresses KM Challenge(s): (Process Knowledge) Acquisition, Modelling, Reuse.

Builds on other technologies: AI Planning, Workflow, Java, HTML, XML, Jabber. Interoperable with: BuddySpace, Compendium

What's the Problem?

A principal goal of knowledge management is the coordination of resources to bring about more effective organisational behaviour; in the context of modern distributed, virtual organisations, when attempting any sort of collaborative synthesis task, likely to require the capabilities of both human and computer agents, the need for such management becomes most evident.

Towards a Solution

The I-X suite of tools is intended to provide a well-founded approach to allow humans and computer systems to cooperate in the creation or modification of some product, be it a document, plan, design or physical entity. The principal interface to these tools, the I-X Process Panel, (I-P2) can be seen, at its simplest, as an intelligent 'to-do' list for its user; however, and especially when used in conjunction with other users' Panels, it can become a workflow, reporting and messaging 'catch all', allowing the coordination of activity, and hence facilitating more successful and efficient collaborations.

A Panel can take ANY requirement to:

Handle an issue;
Perform an activity;
Add a constraint;
Maintain an Annotation.

These requirements can be handled via:

Manual (user) activity;
Internal capabilities;
External capabilities (invoke or query/answer);
Reroute or delegate to other panels or agents (pass);
Plan and execute a composite of these capabilities (expand).

I-X reports and messages can be generated and sent, and the receiving Panel will interpret these communications, where possible, so as to:

Understand current status of issues, activities and constraints;
Understand current world state, especially status of process products;
Help control the situation.

Since it is unrealistic to expect any one participant to have access to full knowledge of the state of the current process during a collaborative episode, I-X tools are expressly intended to operate in situations in which only partial knowledge from a particular perspective is available to a user.

Anatomy of an I-X Process Panel.

<I-N-C-A> Model
An I-X Process Panel supports a user or collaborative users in selecting and carrying out "processes" and creating or modifying "process products". Both processes and process products are abstractly considered to be made up of "Nodes" (activities in a process, or parts of a process product) which may have parts called sub-nodes making up a hierarchical description of the process or product. The nodes are related by a set of detailed "Constraints" of various kinds. A set of "Issues" is associated with the processes or process products to represent unsatisfied requirements, problems raised as a result of analysis or critiquing, etc. Processes and process products in I-X are represented in the <I-N-C-A> (Issues - Nodes - Constraints - Annotations) Model of Synthesised Artifacts.

I-X Tools
As well as the Process Panel itself, a number of additional tools are provided, accessed via a tools menu or through context dependent action menus. These include:

I-DE - the I-X Domain Editor to create and maintain process models and knowledge in <I-N-C-A> format;
I-Messenger - to support structure task orientated messaging and reporting - as well as allowing for free chat where desirable;
I-Space - to maintain relationships between users and panels, as well as descriptions of external services that can be used;
HTML Viewer to provide help pages as well as to look at web pages without resorting to platform dependent full web browsers.

The I-X Tools include: 1. Process Panel (I-P2); 2. Domain Editor (I-DE): create and modify process models; 3. I-Space: maintain relationships with other agents; 4. Messenger: instant messaging tool, for both structured and less formal communications; 5. Issue Editor: create, modify, annotate issues.

Take a Guided Tour

See a demostration of an I-X application here (requires Shockwave).

Try a Demonstration

The current release and documentation is available via http://i-x.info/release/current/ (Version 2.4 available February 2003 runs over Jabber without further software or tailoring.)

Technical requirements: Windows NT/2000/XP or Unix/Linux/MacOS X, Java Runtime Environment 1.3/1.4 (1.4-only planned from mid-2003).

Example Applications

CoAX - 3 Sample Panels.

CoAX - Coalition Agents eXperiment (DARPA CoABS, USA):
    http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/coax/
CoAKTinG - Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid - EPSRC/e-Science, UK):
    http://www.aktors.org/coakting/
CoSAR-TS - Coalition Search and Rescue - Task Support (DARPA DAML, USA):
    http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/cosar-ts/
I-Rescue - PhD Student Projects (Brazil):
    http://i-rescue.org