Serendipity: Integrated Environment Support for Process Modelling, Enactment and Work Coordination

Large cooperative work systems require work coordination, context awareness and process modelling and enactment mechanisms to be effective. Support for process modelling and work coordination in such systems also needs to support informal aspects of work which are difficult to codify. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) facilities, such as inter-person communication and collaborative editing, also need to be well-integrated into both process-modelling tools and tools used to perform work. Serendipity is an environment which provides high-level, visual process modelling and event-handling languages, and diverse CSCW capabilities, and which can be integrated with a range of tools to coordinate cooperative work. This paper describes Serendipity's visual languages, support environment, architecture, and implementation, together with experience using the environment and integrating it with other environments.