Active-Workspaces: A Dynamic Collaborative Business Process Model for Disease Surveillance Systems

Abstract : Flexibility and change at both design-and run-time are fast becoming the Rule rather than the Exception in disease surveillance processes. This is attributed to the diversity in public health threats, to continuous advances in domain knowledge, the increase in expert knowledge, and the diverse and heterogeneous nature of contextual variables. Disease surveillance is one such processes and it is characterized by collaborative work and decision making between users with heterogeneous profiles on processes designed on-the-fly. A model for disease surveillance processes should thus natively support flexible workflow design and enactment as well as human interactions. We show in this paper how the Active Workspaces model proposed by Badouel et al. for distributed collaborative systems provides this support.