to stimulate the next wave of research on organization learning. It provides a conceptual framework for research on the differences and similarities of learning by individuals, groups, and organizations.

Today’s business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area.

this document, text or image about?' Gradually moving from the left to the right in Figure 3.1, different understandings of this concept evolve

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The objective of the paper is to amalgamate theories of text retrieval from various research traditions into a cognitive theory for information retrieval interaction. Set in a cognitive framework, the paper outlines the concept of polyrepresentation applied to both the user's cognitive space and the information space of IR systems. The concept seeks to represent the current user's information need, problem state, and domain work task or interest in a structure of causality. Further, it implies that we should apply different methods of representation and a variety of IR techniques of different cognitive and functional origin simultaneously to each semantic full-text entity in the information space. The cognitive differences imply that by applying cognitive overlaps of information objects, originating from different interpretations of such objects through time and by type, the degree of uncertainty inherent in IR is decreased. Polyrepresentation and the use of cognitive overlaps are associated with, but not identical to, data

Implementations of systems based on distributed agent architectures require an agent communications language that has a clearly de#ned semantics. Without one, neither agents nor developers can be sure what another agent's commitment to perform a task means #to name just one speech act#. This paper demonstrates that a semantics for an agent communications language can be founded on the premise that interagent communications constitute a task-oriented dialogue in which agents are building, maintaining, and disbanding teams through their performance of communicative acts. This view requires that de#nitions of basic communicative acts, such as requesting, be recast in terms of the formation of a jointintention --- a mental state that has been suggested underlies team behavior. Thus, a model of teamwork based on jointintentions is shown to provide the coherence for interagent dialogue, and provides motivation for its step-by-step progression in virtue of the performance of commun...

In this paper we apply the semantics sketched by Smith and Cohen [11] to the system of conversational policies developed for KAoS [1]. We show that the compositional nature of the speech-acts and their semantics allows us to provide a comprehensive semantics for the conversational policies; and that we can use the generated semantics to analyze policies, to alter policies, and to show how the policies can be combined to form complete dialogues and protocol control strategies. We also show that the semantics provides us with a valuable tool to analyze and to suggest corrections for the conversational policies.

Abstract. The role of models in the design of computer systems to support interpersonal and cooperative work is examined. It is argued that the current generation of models over-emphasise determinism at the expense of interpretation in the work process. It is further argued that there are many cases in which designs pass between many different professional groups (office workers, managers, analysts, designers, programmers). Each of these groups has its own worldview and specialised language, and hence they are termed "semantic communities". When designs pass between semantic communities, something is lost and something is gained-- but the objects on which each community works are not commensurable. The distinct objects of work (office problems, analyses, designs, programs) do not map onto each other, and cannot be mutually tested using simple truelfalse criteria. This is termed a problem of "ontological drift", and arises whenever several distinct semantic communities work on the "same " system. It is suggested that the disparity so often observed between design expectations and the ways systems are actually used is therefore quite normal. Current efforts are directed at eliminating the disparity. We suggest that a more fruitful approach might be to accept that the final determination of a system rests with the users. In the long run this might give rise to different types of design principles than those used at the moment. In the short run, even the consciousness of this perspective could make significant differences to design dialogues and attitudes to "users".

A theoretical framework for grounding language is introduced that provides a computational path from sensing and motor action to words and speech acts. The approach combines concepts from semiotics and schema theory to develop a holistic approach to linguistic meaning. Schemas serve as structured beliefs that are grounded in an agent’s physical environment through a causal-predictive cycle of action and perception. Words and basic speech acts are interpreted in terms of grounded schemas. The framework reflects lessons learned from implementations of several language processing robots. It provides a basis for the analysis and design of situated, multimodal communication systems that straddle symbolic and non-symbolic realms.