PROCOGEC (Collaborative Software of Knowledge Management) is a research project, which aims at developing collaborative software that can reuse users' interaction traces and support flexible workflows in order to improve software-supported collaborative activities.
PROCOGEC is funded by the french national agency for research (ANR). The project is led by the company Knowings, which develops and sells collaborative functionalities for content management systems.
This research project stems from a very simple
observation : interpreting the traces generated by a user’s activity on a
given software package leads to a better understanding of his behaviour and of
the context of his work. In order to create a software package capable of
interacting with its users, the partners of the PROCOGEC project are currently
working on the improvement, analysis and exploitation of these traces.
This project, carried out by a team of 35, represents 7,000 man-days over a 3-year period.
Research contributions on Trace-Based Systems (TBS) and dynamic process management are brought by the following laboratories and teams : SYSCOM-lab (University of Savoie), LIRIS-lab (University of Lyon), MUSI-team (Chambéry Business HighSchool, ESC) and G-SCOP-lab (University of Grenoble, INPG). The whole research team works on collecting users interaction traces with and from the platform, abstracting the information about users' activities they contain, analyzing them, and finally reusing them. The platform is thus able to adapt its behavior, to inform users about the scope of their contribution to collaborative activities, to automatically modify the workflow model in which users are involved, to give an access to the most relevant and useful contents, and more generally to develop the collective effectiveness of users and groups.
Research outcomes are intended to be implemented by Knowings into a competitive collaborative platform that can fit the market's expectations, but also to produce several international scientific communications and two PhD thesis.
Two industrial partners will test this new platform: the research department of Gaz De France and the company ANTECIM.