With the advent of modern wireless communication techniques, mobile devices play an increasingly important role in our daily life. Users often use these mobile devices to record and retrieve information about tasks and data. In fact, many of people¡¦s daily activities are not independent, and they are likely to be process-oriented. Previous work reported in [Chen01] used metagraph to model user¡¦s activities and proposed a client-server architecture of personal workflow system for supporting pervasive computing. This architecture allowed users to define their personal processes and provided a set of operations for manipulating them. However, the proposed system is passive in that it did not provide any support to help mobile users construct their personal processes, nor did it provide friendly query interface for users. Our work aims at constructing a personalized workflow template provider and providing a user-friendly interface design. The personalized workflow template provider intends to provide personalized workflow templates of organization-driven processes. Users with different backgrounds and interests may retrieve different personal workflow template to accomplishing the same goal. In client side, we provide five pre-defined queries for mobile user can efficiently inquire a personal process and design a better interface for a mobile user to browse his/her personal processes. At last, we implemented these two components and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed design strategies.

In our daily lives, people constantly need to schedule their activities to meet their personal goals. Many of these activities involve the interaction with organization sectors, which must follow certain regulations in terms of input data, doable time and places. These regulations form personal processes. In previous work, [Chen01] proposed a personal process model that define a personal process as a set of tasks and a coordination on the tasks and a personal workflow system architecture. However, the proposed system is solely to facilitate a mobile user in deciding when, where, and how to process a task. We have noticed that many processes initiated by an individual often involve business processes coming from different organizations. Our objective in this thesis is to revise the personal process model proposed in [Chen01] by incorporating business processes existing in different sectors, developing a simpler query method, and extending personal workflow architecture in support of the new model. In our architecture, the management of personal processes involves three parties: the service provider, the template provider and the PWFMS. The service providers supply personal processes, each of which enable users to achieve a specific goal, and keep track of the status of executed tasks. The template providers incorporate several personal processes from different service providers and form a useful template for a user. The PWFMSs assist users in managing personal processes. In order to prove our idea, we implemented a prototype of the architecture.