Supporting Collaboration Through Semantic-Based Workflow and Constraint Solving

This paper describes our efforts to provide a collaborative problem solving architecture driven by semantic-based workflow orchestration and constraint problem solving. These technologies are based on shared ontologies that allows two systems of very different natures to communicate, perform specialised tasks and achieve common goals. We give an account of our approach for the workflow assisted collaboration with constraint solving capabilities. We found that systems built with semantic (web) based technologies is useful for collaboration and flexible to enhance the system with specialised capabilities. However, much care must be exercised before correct semantics may be exchanged and collaborations occur smoothly.