Modeling Contexts for Business Process Oriented Knowledge Support

While performing knowledge driven tasks, people at organizations spend time searching the required support information. In order to effectively support knowledge driven tasks, information should be timely and proactively provided to its consumers according to its usage context and patterns. In this paper we define the concepts of action and interaction contexts. More specifically, we define action context as the interplay of actor, role, task and time related features. We focus on actors' capabilities for handling several action contexts. Interaction contexts are defined as the supporting components of actors' interactions related to business processes. Actors and business processes are approached as a network of action and interaction contexts managed by an "operating system". We relate the defined concepts and propose a business process oriented and context-based modeling approach which aims to provide a richer, efficient and flexible semantics, capable of better representing the complexity of actual business process execution and facilitating a proactive and timely knowledge support of business actors. We illustrate some of these ideas with a working example.