=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1789/bpm-demo-2016-paper12
|storemode=property
|title=Agora - Speech-Act-Based Adaptive Case Management
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1789/bpm-demo-2016-paper12.pdf
|volume=Vol-1789
|authors=Johannes Tenschert,Richard Lenz
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/bpm/TenschertL16
}}
==Agora - Speech-Act-Based Adaptive Case Management==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1789/bpm-demo-2016-paper12.pdf
Agora - Speech-Act-Based
Adaptive Case Management
Johannes Tenschert and Richard Lenz
Institute of Computer Science 6, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg,
{johannes.tenschert,richard.lenz}@fau.de
Abstract. Today’s work is increasingly characterized by unpredictable
collaborative processes called knowledge work. Some types of knowledge
work are supported by case management tools which typically provide
regulated access to case-related information. Knowledge workers are well
aware of the pragmatic dimension of their communicative acts, but the
systems they are using currently are not. This demo paper presents a
prototype of a speech-act-based adaptive case management tool we call
Agora. In Agora, we focus on interactions of a case and enable flexible
documentation of ad-hoc interactions and activities as well as support for
(semi-)structured processes. Interactions are linked to appropriate arti-
facts of the case. The approach enables useful inferences by the user and
automatically by a system from all documented interactions and case-
related data. For example, it can help in unveiling assertions and commit-
ments, finding unfulfilled promises, and automatic reactions to certain
interactions. Thereby, the approach facilitates integration of structured,
semi-structured and ad-hoc processes.
Keywords: adaptive case management, speech act theory, knowledge-
intensive business process
1 Background and Significance to BPM
Business process management is aimed at supporting cooperative work and
shows its advantages especially in optimizing structured processes. However, in
recent years the share of knowledge work has increased rapidly. Knowledge work
involves the creation, distribution, or application of knowledge [2]. In contrast
to a manual worker’s clearly defined activities, knowledge work is character-
ized by abstractly defined tasks and the knowledge worker’s responsibility for
his own contribution in terms of quantity and quality [3]. In the US, around
50% of today’s work is knowledge work [6]. Currently, interactions in knowledge
work are supported by providing groupware and collaboration tools. Knowledge
workers may also use an adaptive case management system (ACMS), tailored in-
formation systems, and other (process) support systems. Therefore, case data is
scattered across many systems, and the overlapping structured, semi-structured
Copyright c 2016 for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for private and
academic purposes.
62 Tenschert and Lenz
and ad-hoc processes involved in actual knowledge work further impede keeping
track of related data, activities and interactions.
Our speech-act-based approach focuses on interactions of a case, and enables
flexible documentation of ad-hoc interactions and activities, as well as support
for (semi-)structured processes. It relates interactions to artifacts and makes the
pragmatic intention of interactions explicit to facilitate useful inferences by the
user or automatically by the system. Examples for these inferences are unveiling
all assertions and commitments, finding unfulfilled promises, checking whether
important stakeholders have been informed, or automatically reacting to certain
interactions and situations, e. g. informing legal guardians about certain inter-
actions. Moreover, the model enables compliance monitoring on interactions [9].
No process schema is necessary for a case, but if a more detailed schema can be
given, the possibilities for support and inference increase. This demonstration
introduces Agora, the prototype implementing our speech-act-based approach.
We use Speech Act Theory to classify and represent interactions. Speech Act
Theory was first introduced by Austin [1], and further elaborated by Searle [4,
5]. Saying something is an action with a particular intention of the speaker.
Not only utterances are speech acts, but rather all activities with the intention
to send a message. Some types of interactions adhere to typical patterns, e. g.
questions are usually followed by an answer. The speaker is well aware of this
context and of his pragmatic intention, but the systems supporting him currently
are not. A speech act consists of its illocutionary force F , i. e. the intention of the
utterance, and its propositional content P . Searle’s F (P ) framework allows that
propositional content may also be a speech act, i. e. speech acts can be nested
(“Alice informed me that bob promised...”).
One example use case of Agora is writing a conference paper. Finding ap-
propriate results for publication is not a structured process and varies from
case to case. However, there are some similarities between cases: Usually, sev-
eral authors are involved, case-specific agreements occur, and these agreements
contain speech acts. By documenting and classifying these interactions, useful
inferences and relations can be displayed. One could start by giving the project
some working title and collecting artifacts (sketches, emails). The actual writing
of the paper will be predominantly ad-hoc, but there are many interactions: ques-
tions, promises (“I’ll write Section 2.”), complaints (“I don’t like the abstract!”),
requests for meetings, and so forth. Some tasks could be automatized as a micro
process [7], for example creating a git repository. This process may contain the
creation of the repository, storing its location in the case’s master data, and
emails to stakeholders of the case to inform them about the repository. In most
cases, the process of submitting a paper to a conference only differs slightly. A
micro process might create some tasks to find deadlines and to document them,
informing all authors, submitting the abstract, and submitting the paper. If it
is accepted, more structured tasks are triggered: “Hooray” to all authors, sub-
mitting a camera ready version, registering at the conference, and booking the
trip. At the conference, many contacts and interactions can be documented in
Agora. After the trip, a structured process to settle travel expenses is triggered.
Agora - Speech-Act-Based Adaptive Case Management 63
Fig. 1: Overview of speech acts of a case
Other examples that require handling cases in a flexible way and involve many
interactions are treating and informing patients, handling legal cases, and super-
vising theses. Agora integrates well-known and well-established BPM techniques
for structured processes with speech-act-based support for ad-hoc cooperation.
2 Model and Implementation
This section introduces the representation of cases in our approach, outlines the
key features of the prototype Agora, and briefly describes its implementation.
2.1 Cases
Agora manages a set of cases. Each case consists of interactions, contacts, tasks,
documents, notes, related process instances, and key-value-based master data.
Interactions are documented speech acts with a specific creator of the documen-
tation. Speech acts contain a sender, one or more recipients, an illocutionary
force, and propositional content in the form of text, speech acts or production
acts for artifacts, and logically connected text and acts adhering to Searle’s F(P)
framework. Speech acts can be linked to artifacts of a case, e. g. documents and
tasks. Figure 1 shows how interactions of a case can be displayed. Here, users
can expand and collapse propositional content of all or individual speech acts
for an overview of all interactions of a case as well as for detailed information.
Related process instances currently are restricted to micro processes [7]. In the
near future, they will also contain structured processes in an external BPMS,
e. g. to settle travel expenses or grade and properly archive a thesis.
64 Tenschert and Lenz
2.2 Features
Agora provides flexible key-value annotations for cases and artifacts. These anno-
tations can be organized in tabs and arranged freely according to the knowledge
worker’s preference. In order to make certain interactions involved in the genera-
tion of documents or completing tasks visible to the user and an inference engine,
interactions are either automatically or manually linked to appropriate artifacts.
Since Agora focuses on interactions, contacts involved in a case should be easy
to maintain. Often, stakeholders are shared across many cases, e. g. attorneys
and judges. Therefore, contacts are created once and can then be referenced.
Contacts can be annotated with one or many roles in a case. The roles are not
intended to be used like the traditional roles of BPM systems. They are intended
to help managing the stakeholders involved, and can be used e. g. for simplifying
document generation or preselecting contacts in a micro process.
Document templates may use certain artifacts (e. g. contacts) and master
data (e. g. file reference, working title) of a case to generate word documents or
emails. For example, while dealing with a thesis and if the student is a docu-
mented stakeholder of the case, the registration at the exam office can be gener-
ated. Also, travel expense settlement forms for attending a conference could be
pre-populated. Micro processes [7] are tightly integrated into the prototype to
automate routine fragments. They allow parallelism, missing attributes of inter-
actions and actions that are clarified during execution, and flexible user input
for several tokens of a process instance at the same time. Inferences currently
are hard-coded into the system, but already allow for example to find unfulfilled
promises and to display all assertions. The system is prepared to provide auto-
matic reactions for interactions according to the type of interaction and the case’s
master data, e. g. to inform legal guardians about activities. The Agora client
is a single-page web application. It synchronizes certain artifacts (e. g. contacts,
cases, current view) continuously to facilitate collaboration.
2.3 Architecture and implementation
The architecture of our approach is described in [8]. On the server side, Agora is
implemented in Java servlets. The servlets provide REST interfaces that return
JSON. Clients access these REST interfaces with a single-page web application
based on HTML5, AngularJS, and Bootstrap. Case data and processes are stored
in a relational database and accessed with Hibernate.
Moreover, a JSON library has been developed to easily map objects to dif-
ferent profiles, i. e. to not reimplement the same classes for specific views (con-
fidentiality, volume). An additional layer for templates of word documents has
been created based on docx4j. This document generation layer handles merge
fields, parameters, and dynamically generated formatted paragraphs and runs.
3 Maturity and Future Work
The Agora prototype is intended to demonstrate how interaction artifacts and
the pragmatic intention of interactions can be integrated into an adaptive case
Agora - Speech-Act-Based Adaptive Case Management 65
management system. It has not yet been evaluated with end users. Agora sup-
ports interactions that are part of structured processes, emerge in semi-structured
processes, or are documented in an ad-hoc fashion. The system provides a flexi-
ble data model that allows knowledge workers to create arbitrary annotations for
cases and artifacts, and to relate interactions to artifacts. A screencast is avail-
able at http://www6.cs.fau.de/people/johannes-tenschert/bpm-2016.
Future versions of Agora will improve inferences, usability, and traceability
of interactions. Currently inferences are hard-coded. There is active develop-
ment to integrate business rules according to [8, 9] for integration of structured,
semi-structured and ad-hoc processes as well as for compliance monitoring. It is
intended to allow user-definable domain-specific business rules. The data model
of artifacts in Agora is flexible, and the model of artifacts typically managed
with a smartphone and groupware (e. g. contacts, tasks, and notes) is very simi-
lar to the appropriate web standards vCard and iCalender in order to facilitate
synchronization in the future. Therefore, knowledge workers can choose their
preferred gadgets and tools to work on a case. Finally, the model and implemen-
tation will be improved to further support traceability of interactions. Currently,
a case is one conversation, and the interactions forming logical connections, e. g.
accepting a specific proposal, are not explicitly linked together. Ideally, find-
ing the reason of performing certain (speech) acts should not require to read
the whole conversation, and typical patterns of interaction could be supported
without extensive manual documentation.
The vision for a final prototype is that even though case data may still be
distributed across certain devices and BPMSs, the ACMS would be a system of
record that includes and references all (interaction) artifacts of a case. It should
suggest appropriate activities, integrate with the tools knowledge workers actu-
ally use, reduce the time to hunt for information and creating routine artifacts,
and provide useful inferences for dealing with the case at hand.
References
1. Austin, J.L.: How to do things with words. Oxford university press (1975)
2. Davenport, T.H.: Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances and Re-
sults from Knowledge Workers, chap. What’s a Knowledge Worker, Anyway?, pp.
1–24. Harvard Business Press (2005)
3. Drucker, P.F.: Knowledge-worker productivity: The biggest challenge. California
Management Review 41(2), 79–94 (1999)
4. Searle, J.R.: Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge uni-
versity press (1969)
5. Searle, J.R., Vanderveken, D.: Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge Uni-
versity Press (1985)
6. Swenson, K.D.: Robots don’t innovate - innovation vs automation in BPM (May
2015)
7. Tenschert, J., Lenz, R.: Supporting knowledge work by speech-act based templates
for micro processes. In: AdaptiveCM 2015–4th International Workshop on Adaptive
Case Management and other non-workflow approaches to BPM (2015)
66 Tenschert and Lenz
8. Tenschert, J., Lenz, R.: Towards speech-act-based adaptive case management. In:
AdaptiveCM 2016–5th International Workshop on Adaptive Case Management and
other non-workflow approaches to BPM (2016)
9. Tenschert, J., Michelson, G., Lenz, R.: Towards speech-act-based compliance. In:
2016 IEEE 18th Conference on Business Informatics (2016)