Collaborative Human Interaction Services

In COIN we explore our vision of human interactions in future networks of enterprises. To ensure efficient collaboration among enterprises, human interactions must be supported by a set of novel concepts enabling seamless integration of human interactions in compositions of services. Enabling effective support for human interactions in service-oriented environments is one major key success factor towards achieving efficient collaboration among enterprises.

In COIN we have to cover several innovation requirements with respect to human interaction support, such as enabling flexible collaborations, network based information sharing, modeling and considering context, and creating participative social software. On this basis we introduce Collaborative Human Interaction (c-HI) concepts, incorporating results from previous projects and frameworks, and extended for the COIN collaboration scenario of networked SMEs. Particularly we highlight the concepts of activity-centric collaborations, the role of human- and service interactions therein, and the concept of human provided services. We further examine the role of collaboration context, and introduce the notion of trust between collaboration participants in COIN.

Four c-HI end-user tools, and services realizing the aforementioned collaboration concepts are highlighted:

• Visualization Tool, for examining network structures and collaboration metrics, including trust,
  

• Trusted Information Sharing, which enables users belonging to different organizations to share project artefacts,

• an advanced Discussion Forum, which allows to link, search, and utilize human provided services in threaded discussion structures,
  
• a tool implementing context-aware Online Support, either through traditional communication channels or by the concept of human provided services.