Coordination Artifacts Research Articles

The Legacy of Coordinative Practice: How the Mesh of Formal and Informal Articulation Work Through Time Affects a Shipyard in Transition

This article explores the balance, and the shift in balance, between technologies and practices that coordinate work. The empirical data stems from a primarily qualitative study of a Norwegian shipyard in a phase of transition, where new models of collaboration emerge due to changes in the company environment. The article highlights the interplay between formal and informal articulation work, as well as the role of coordinative IT artifacts in this regard. With this background, the findings show that the balance (between coordinative technologies and practices) shifts depending on circumstances. Thus, the more formal coordination gains importance as transitions increases the need for detailed instructions. The findings also show that the existing IT infrastructure (the legacy) lacks the granularity as a coordinative artifact to facilitate necessary change in the organizational work arrangement, and how the workers cope with such issues. Based on this, the paper provides insights into how articulation work and its sociomaterial aspects develops over time in the interplay of organizational and technological change (or lack thereof).

Encoding Collective Knowledge, Instructing Data Reusers: The Collaborative Fixation of a Digital Scientific Data Set

This article provides a novel perspective on the use and reuse of scientific data by providing a chronological ethnographic account and analysis of how a team of researchers prepared an astronomical catalogue (a table of measured properties of galaxies) for public release. Whereas much existing work on data reuse has focused on information about data (such as metadata), whose form or lack has been described as a hurdle for reusing data successfully, I describe how data makers tried to instruct users through the processed data themselves. The fixation of this catalogue was a negotiation, resulting in what was acceptable to team members and coherent with the diverse data uses pertinent to their completed work. It was through preparing their catalogue as an ‘instructing data object’ that this team seeked to encode its members’ knowledge of how the data were processed and to make it consequential for users by devising methodical ways to structure anticipated uses. These methods included introducing redundancies that would help users to self-correct mistaken uses, selectively deleting data, and deflecting accountability through making notational choices. They dwell on an understanding of knowledge not as exclusively propositional (such as the belief in propositions), but as embedded in witnessable activities and the products of these activities. I discuss the implications of this account for philosophical notions of collective knowledge and for theorizing coordinative artifacts in CSCW. Eventually, I identify a tension between ‘using algorithms’ and ‘doing science’ in preparing data sets and show how it was resolved in this case.

Surgical Video Summarization

While surgical videos are valuable support material for activities around surgery, their summarization demands great amounts of time from surgeons, resulting in the production of very few videos. We study the practices involving surgical video to motivate and inform the future design of tools for their summarization. Through interviews and observations in a field study, we find that (1) video summaries provide an important support for surgery, being used for self-improvement, education, discussing cases, scientific research, patient communication and as legal resources; (2) video summarization follows a process hindered by the loss of knowledge that originates during recording; and, (3) surgeons develop ad-hoc coordination strategies which involve using the video itself for articulation work, making it both the field of work and coordination artifact. We discuss ways in which tools can facilitate capturing knowledge during live action using these strategies.

Coordination artifacts in Agile Software Development

Agile Software Development is characterized by collaborative social interactions and fast-paced and iterative changes in project requirements. Much of the extant Agile development literature focuses on team and organizational aspects of Agile development projects. However, coordination mechanisms used within Agile projects have received less attention. Particularly, existing research lacks a discussion on how artifacts are applied in Agile software development to support project coordination, and how their potential for information richness and mutability impact their ability to support coordination.To address these issues, we conducted a case study of an Agile development project that involved customer and vendor organizations. Our case follows the interactions between the two organizations, identifies the different types of artifacts that they utilized to coordinate their joint activities throughout the various phases of the project, and traces the enactment of these artifacts' informational potential.Our study reveals that the organizations applied four different types of coordination artifacts - Foundational, Projective, Exposition and Indicative artifacts – to address different coordination challenges that arose throughout the project. The four types of artifacts were characterized by varying levels of information richness and mutability, which were shaped to support the Agile activities within which they were used.Our study enriches the understanding of the role of coordination artifacts in Agile projects, provides insights on the informational potential of the artifacts, and highlights some of the pitfalls than can result from misunderstanding object use.

No Workflow Can Ever Be Enough

The dominant crowdsourcing infrastructure today is the workflow, which decomposes goals into small independent tasks. However, complex goals such as design and engineering have remained stubbornly difficult to achieve with crowdsourcing workflows. Is this due to a lack of imagination, or a more fundamental limit? This paper explores this question through in-depth case studies of 22 workers across six workflow-based crowd teams, each pursuing a complex and interdependent web development goal. We used an inductive mixed method approach to analyze behavior trace data, chat logs, survey responses and work artifacts to understand how workers enacted and adapted the crowdsourcing workflows. Our results indicate that workflows served as useful coordination artifacts, but in many cases critically inhibited crowd workers from pursuing real-time adaptations to their work plans. However, the CSCW and organizational behavior literature argues that all sufficiently complex goals require open-ended adaptation. If complex work requires adaptation but traditional static crowdsourcing workflows can't support it, our results suggest that complex work may remain a fundamental limitation of workflow-based crowdsourcing infrastructures.

Thermogeometric phase transition in a unified framework

Using geomterothermodynamics (GTD), we investigate the phase transition of black hole in a metric independent way. We show that for any black hole, curvature scalar (of equilibrium state space geometry) is singular at the point where specific heat diverges. Previously such a result could only be shown by taking specific examples on a case by case basis. A different type of phase transition, where inverse specific heat diverges, is also studied within this framework. We show that in the latter case, metric (of equilibrium state space geometry) is singular instead of curvature scalar. Since a metric singularity may be a coordinate artifact, we propose that GTD indicates that it is the singularity of specific heat and not inverse specific heat which indicates a phase transition of black holes.

Planck-Scale Dual-Curvature Lensing and Spacetime Noncommutativity

It was recently realized that Planck-scale momentum-space curvature, which is expected in some approaches to the quantum-gravity problem, can produce dual-curvature lensing, a feature which mainly affects the direction of observation of particles emitted by very distant sources. Several gray areas remain in our understanding of dual-curvature lensing, including the possibility that it might be just a coordinate artifact and the possibility that it might be in some sense a by-product of the better studied dual-curvature redshift. We stress that data reported by the IceCube neutrino telescope should motivate a more vigorous effort of investigation of dual-curvature lensing, and we observe that studies of the recently proposed “ρ-Minkowski noncommutative spacetime” could be valuable from this perspective. Through a dedicated ρ-Minkowski analysis, we show that dual-curvature lensing is not merely a coordinate artifact and that it can be present even in theories without dual-curvature redshift.

Simplified derivation of the gravitational wave stress tensor from the linearized Einstein field equations

A conserved stress energy tensor for weak field gravitational waves propagating in vacuum is derived directly from the linearized general relativistic wave equation alone, for an arbitrary gauge. In any harmonic gauge, the form of the tensor leads directly to the classical expression for the outgoing wave energy. The method described here, however, is a much simpler, shorter, and more physically motivated approach than is the customary procedure, which involves a lengthy and cumbersome second-order (in wave-amplitude) calculation starting with the Einstein tensor. Our method has the added advantage of exhibiting the direct coupling between the outgoing wave energy flux and the work done by the gravitational field on the sources. For nonharmonic gauges, the directly derived wave stress tensor has an apparent index asymmetry. This coordinate artifact may be straightforwardly removed, and the symmetrized (still gauge-invariant) tensor then takes on its widely used form. Angular momentum conservation follows immediately. For any harmonic gauge, however, the stress tensor found is manifestly symmetric from the start, and its derivation depends, in its entirety, on the structure of the linearized wave equation.

A New Integrated Model for Multitasking during Web Searching

There have been many studies in the field of information behavior. Recently Du and Spink (2011) presented a model, which simulates multitasking, cognitive coordination and cognitive shifts on web. However, this model does not incorporate personal variables and the impact of task or web design. This research addresses this gap. Information and psychological scientists have shown that information behavior (IR) is affected by: the affective domain, cognitive attributes, psychological factors, personality dimensions and sociological factors. This study investigates how IR is affected by working memory (wm), cognitive coordination, cognitive shifts and various artifacts and task variables influenced by the PAT model (Personal, Artifact and Task characteristics) of flow. The research is exploratory and takes a pragmatic, mixed method approach. Thirty University students will participate. The research tools include: pre and post questionnaires, working memory tests, Flow State Scale test, think aloud data, observations, audio-visual data, web search logs and use of the Critical Decision Method. The qualitative data will be coded and analyzed thematically and will be related to the quantitative data. This study is expected to identify the impact of all these variables on multitasking IR in the web and provide a new integrated framework, which is not only going to help information scientists to better understand this behavior but also web companies to develop more effective web products.

Minds as social institutions

I will first discuss how social interactions organize, coordinate, and specialize as “artifacts,” tools; how these tools are not only for coordination but for achieving something, for some outcome (goal/function), for a collective work. In particular, I will argue that these artifacts specify (predict and prescribe) the mental contents of the participants, both in terms of beliefs and acceptances and in terms of motives and plans. We have to revise the behavioristic view of “scripts” and “roles”; when we play a role we wear a “mind.” No collective action would be possible without shared and/or ascribed mental contents. This is also very crucial for a central form of automatic mind-reading (mind ascription). Second, I will argue that often what really matters is the ascribed/prescribed, worn, mind not the real, private one. We have to play (like in the symbolic play) “as if” we had those mental contents. This social convention and mutual assumption makes the interaction work. The ascribed beliefs and goals are not necessarily explicitly there; they might be just implicit as inactive (we act just by routine and automatically) or implicit as potential. The coordination and social action works thanks to these “as if” (ascribed and pretended) minds, thanks to those conventional constructs. Our social minds for social interactions are coordination artifacts and social institutions.

Artificial Societies in a Community-Based Approach to Ambient Intelligence

This paper presents an agent-based approach to the modeling, design and engineering of ambient intelligence systems. The introduced approach balances the management of the complexity related to the enactment of an ambient intelligence scenario between the agents and the structured environment they populate. The dynamics of local actions and interactions of agents situated in this environment originates the overall organized system behaviour. The environment is shaped according to the notion of active coordination artifact, whose seminal definition was given in Computer Supported Cooperative Work literature by Schmidt and Simone and then evolved in other research contexts. A technique to configure and interact with such environments, i.e. the composition of device functionalities according to their high-level features, and services provided, is presented. A scenario is used as an in-depth example, and the architecture of a sample system implementing the same scenario using our reference middleware is discussed.

Formal ReSpecT in the A&A Perspective

Coordination models and languages have found a new course in the context of MAS (multiagent systems). By re-interpreting results in terms of agent-oriented abstractions, new conceptual spaces are found, which extend the reach of coordination techniques far beyond their original scope. This is for instance the case of coordination media, when recasted in terms of coordination artifacts in the MAS context.In this paper, we take the well-established ReSpecT language for programming tuple centre behaviour, and adopt the A&A (agents and artifacts) meta-model as a perspective to reinterpret, revise, extend and complete it. A formal model of the so-called A&A ReSpecT language is presented, along with an example illustrating its use for MAS coordination.

The cognitive and behavioral mediation of institutions: Towards an account of institutional actions

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of institutional actions from the standpoint of cognitive science. The notion of constitutive rules have been proposed to describe the conceptual nature of institutions. In this paper it is extended to cover specific processes of ‘recognition’ that provide the agents with additional artificial powers. The power of doing an institutional action is considered as a special kind of artificial power. It is argued that institutional actions achieve their effects thanks to a cognitive and behavioral mediation of a collective of agents. Individual actions are seen and treated as (count as) institutional actions by the involved participants even if, in fact, institutional actions are collective actions. When human behavior becomes institutionalized, it acquires special conventional powers to bring about effects in the social world. A model of such conventional empowerment of an agent is proposed and is identified in a sort of collective permission. Finally it is argued that institutions are a specific kind of coordination artifacts. In particular, the importance of institutional roles as artifacts that assign conventional powers is investigated.

Operating instructions for intelligent agent coordination

In contrast to standard approaches based on agent communication languages (ACLs), environment-based coordination is emerging as an interesting alternative for structuring interactions in multiagent systems (MASs). In particular, the notion of coordination artifacts has been proposed as an engineering methodology to build runtime abstractions effectively providing collaborating agents with specifically designed coordination tasks.In this paper, we study the semantics for the interaction of agents with coordination artifacts playing the same role of ACL semantics, that is, supporting semantic interoperability between agents developed by different parties through the connection between rationality and interaction. Our approach is rooted on the notion of operating instructions of coordination artifacts, which—as with a manual for a human exploiting a device—describe the interaction protocols the agent can follow as well as the mentalistic semantics of each single interaction. By tackling some of the most relevant issues raised in the context of ACL semantics, our framework allows intelligent, BDI-like agents to carry on complex interactions through coordination artifacts in a rational way.

A business model for deploying Web services:A data-centric approach based on factual dependencies

The standards XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI allow (i) services to be accessed and executed via the Web; and (ii) a loose coupling of these services. Thanks to these standards, Web services technology is becoming not only a de facto integration standard, but also a de facto Internet standard instance of the SOA architecture. However, the deployment of such a technology is still hindered by some technical as well as methodological issues. This paper proposes a business model with multiple interfaced abstraction levels as a framework to methodologically deploy Web services technology with respect to SOA architecture. The attributes describing the business objects and coordination artifacts as described in the highest abstraction level of the business model, i.e. the universe of discourse, are aggregated according to a time/space constraint called factual dependency. Each aggregation of factually dependent attributes is validated with regard to an actual business event. The aggregation is then interfaced to lead to a well-specified Web service. The resulting comprehensive set of consistent Web services are then registered in a public or a private UDDI to be discovered and invoked by any business process. The proposed Web services generation process aims at unlocking and turning informational assets into actions. It differs from the current IT perspective approaches that generate Web services directly from redundant and inconsistent elements in the enterprise information systems.

Coordination Artifacts: A Unifying Abstraction for Engineering Environment-Mediated Coordination in MAS

Coordination Artifacts: A Unifying Abstraction for Engineering Environment-Mediated Coordination in MAS

Ordering Systems: Coordinative Practices and Artifacts in Architectural Design and Planning

In their cooperative effort, architects depend critically on elaborate coordinative practices and artifacts. The article presents, on the basis of an in-depth study of architectural work, an analysis of these practices and artifacts and shows that they are multilaterally interrelated and form complexes of interrelated practices and artifacts which we have dubbed 'ordering systems'. In doing so, the article outlines an approach to investigating and conceiving of such practices.

MULTI-AGENT INFRASTRUCTURES FOR OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE COORDINATION

Coordination in multi-agented systems (MAS) can be conceived as either an agent activity (the subjective viewpoint) or an activity over agents (the objective viewpoint). The two viewpoints have generated two diverging and often contrasting lines of research, as well as different and noncompatible technologies, however, their integration is mandatory for modeling and engineering complex MAS. In this paper, we explore the issue of integration at both the model and the technology levels. First, by taking FIPA agents and coordination artifacts as reference notions for subjective and objective approaches, respectively, we sketch a framework where agent interactions with coordination artifacts are modeled as physical acts, deliberated and executed by agents analogously to communicative actions. Then, we show how the JADE infrastructure for FIPA-compliant agents, and the TuCSoN infrastructure providing agents with coordination artifacts can be integrated at the technology level, allowing JADE agents to access TuCSoN tuple centers through JADE services.

COORDINATION AND COLLABORATION ACTIVITIES IN COOPERATIVE INFORMATION SYSTEMS

The notions of coordination, collaboration and cooperation have originated a number of heterogeneous research lines in diverse scientific areas, both inside and outside Computer Science — along with a number of different acceptations for the terms as well. The basic and almost obvious correlation between these terms, however, has not yet led to a satisfactory scientific overall picture that could put them in the right perspective, emphasizing their commonalities and distinctions. Still, there is a great potential for cross-fertilization between the different strands of work. In particular, if the mutual relationship between these terms was understood and commonly accepted, it would be much easier to adapt and apply many innovative ideas developed by the different communities to the field of cooperative information systems. In this article, we outline a possible unified conceptual framework, by suitably re-interpreting findings from Activity Theory. There, a clear definition for both coordination and cooperation as collaborative activities can be found and used as a reference, which is centred around the notion of (coordination) artifact. Then, we gladly introduce four contributions, selected from the best papers of the 18th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing and suitably revised for the International Journal on Cooperative Information Systems, that show how some of the most recent results of the research on coordination can be fruitfully exploited and applied to the field of cooperative information systems.

Ordering systems

In their cooperative effort, architects depend critically on elaborate coordinative practices and artifacts. The paper presents, on the basis of an in-depth study of architectural work, an analysis of these practices and artifacts and shows that they are multilaterally interrelated and form complexes of interrelated practices and artifacts which we have dubbed 'ordering systems'. In doing so, the paper outlines a conceptual framework for investigating and conceiving of such practices.