Time Contexts in Document-Driven Projects on the Web: From Time-Sensitive Links towards an Ontology of Time

摘要

Time is the core resource of a project. A project combines human and non-human resources together into a temporary organization that aims to achieve a specified objective. A project has a temporal structure of its own, with related operations and deliverables that also are functions of time. In knowledge-intensive organizations, more and more projects are distributed, document-driven processes with parallel phases and tasks. Change management between parallel phases and tasks with associated documents has become one of the core functions in distributed project management. In our paper, we present a framework for time contexts in distributed project management environments, particularly from a project manager's point of view. In document-driven projects, document life-cycles, the statuses of documents, temporal relations between documents, all define the document logistics of a project and describe the overall temporal structure of a project. We analyze the life-cycles of project documents with related time statuses and temporal relations between different documents. We apply time-sensitive links to illustrate the temporal characteristics of project documents and to construct time-based navigation support through the life-cycles and temporal relations of the project documents in single and simple project environments. Our approach is designed to be applied especially to the analysis phase of document logistics from a time-based project management point of view before an organization selects and implements a commercial or customized distributed project management system. We extend our approach to more complex, multi-project environments. We discuss an ontology of time, and Topic Maps as a means of analyzing, deriving and managing time rule sets separated from project document space. The focus of our approach is on knowledge-intensive organizations, on Web-based document-centric projects and on solutions based on W3C Recommendations.