TMS for multimodal information processing

Many working processes are complex and composed by heterogeneous atomic tasks, e.g. editing, assembling data from different sources (as databases or laboratory's devices) with texts, images or learning objects, or submitting them to processing components to retrieve information, to render them, re-format, submit to computations, and other types of information processing. All these complex processes are extremely difficult to be modeled and automatized without having a flexible, multimodular evolutionary system in place. Support to information from different modalities increases the performance of a computer system originally designed for a task with a unimodular nature. In this paper, we discuss the idea of task management system (TMS) as a component based system which offers a virtual workbench to search, acquire, describe and assemble computational agents performing single autonomous tasks into working processes. We sustain that TMS is a cutting edge platform to develop SW solutions for problems related to workflow automatization and design. The architecture we propose follows the conceptual track of the TMS to allow composition and arrangement of atomic modules into a complex system: a core configuration of the system can be extended with a set of task/components, chunks of activities which are considered basic to working flow composition. The workflow designer selects the relevant chunks from system repositories, drags them into a working system area and assembles them into a working process. Complex activities could be formally described, implemented and applied with a consequent advantage for personnel re-organization toward more conceptual activities.