ACTISE: Advanced e-Commerce Technology Laboratory's Integrated Services Environment - A User-centric office framework for knowledge workers

This paper describes the design and implementation of a smart office task framework to automate system integration and to enable user centric application. To achieve the goal of implicit knowledge accumulation and inheritance, we developed a service framework at the backend for integrating diverse systems seamlessly and an interface agent at the front for hiding complex efforts on manually binding different systems. ACT (Advanced e-Commerce Technology) laboratory adopted Web Services to wrap various existing systems into a general RMI format, utilized ontology to define and to integrate new functionalities semantically, and took advantage of agents to enable a user-centric office environment. The design rationale, application scenario, architecture, and future plan are presented.