Cooperative information systems: a conceptual framework and a modeling

This paper presents a definition of cooperative information systems as the support of communication services and semantic services, which allow implementation of interaction among different internal knowledge sources. These sources are different kinds of subsystems of the IS: collective, group or individual IS used respectively at enterprise, group or individual levels. The framework attempts to perceive and capture the structural and functional properties of the cooperative IS. The structure of a cooperative IS is made up of knowledge sources and interaction. While the functions are based on a set of communication services and semantic services. These functions allow the cooperative IS to be either an integrator or a support for the cooperative work. A knowledge source in the framework is perceived according to its internal and communicative aspects while a fixed or dynamic interaction is specialized according to its situations such as transmission, coordination or cooperation. The modeling allows a conceptual representation of both the structural and functional properties. The concepts used at the conceptual level are: communicating entity, interaction, conceptual network, and task and action