CMS - AN INTELLIGENT KNOWLEDGE-BASED TOOL FOR ORGANIZATIONAL PROCEDURE MODELING AND EXECUTION

The design and implementation of CMS (Collaboration Management System), an intelligent knowledge-based tool designed to help organization members execute organizational procedures is described. CMS is aimed at automating the relationships and roles of organization members, rather than just transactions, so that a procedure can be executed by groups of problem solvers acting autonomously, cooperatively, and collaboratively to achieve the collective goal. This collaborative process model supports the definition, execution, monitoring, and dynamic modification of organizational procedures and is implemented as an object-oriented knowledge-bassed system. Our primary intent is to document the implementation strategy we employed, which is based on the integration of object-oriented programming into the logic programming environment of Prolog. This integration proves to be a powerful knowledge-based application development environment that preserves the best features of each technology within the system. Thus, CMS inherits its capability of structuring and organizing problem-solving knowledge of the application from object-oriented technology and its expressive power, pattern matching, and automatic backtracking characteristics from logic programming.