Scaffolds for Work Process Modeling

The project “Scaffolds for Work Process Modeling” is concerned with supporting domain experts in articulating their knowledge about work processes and enabling them to collaboratively create consolidated representations that can directly be processed in information systems. Based upon earlier research, it adopts the pedagogical concept of scaffolding to support the articulation and elicitation process of the involved people. Scaffolding refers to the process of providing guidance to learners in completing a task and support them in developing the necessary skills themselves. The goal of scaffolding is to gradually fade out and ultimately become dispensable, because learners have acquired the necessary skills. In the context of modeling work processes, this is necessary, as actors cannot be assumed to have any knowledge in conceptual modeling, which is required to create appropriate representations. Scaffolds will be developed for collaborative model articulation and for refining the models towards syntactically correct and semantically complete representations of the work process. Articulation and refinement are collaborative acts that ultimately should lead to the alignment of different perspectives on work processes.