Consensus dynamics in online collaboration systems

Modeling characteristics in the design of e-collaboration systems

Among the many ways to do business, e-collaboration system is gradually widely used by virtue of its advantages. Yet, designing e-collaboration systems still proves to be a great challenge due to the incomplete and inaccurate design specifications. This paper presents a characteristic modeling approach to facilitate e-collaboration system design. This approach transforms e-collaboration requirements descriptions into four types of design models. The coordination, communication, collaboration, and connectivity characteristics of e-collaborative systems are firstly addressed in these design models. In general, these models are designed to provide a more comprehensive and accurate system specification than the original requirement descriptions. The approach intends to provide a systematical approach for modeling e-collaboration processes to support e-collaboration systems design.