A system and method are provided that overcome the previously described
limitations of prior art systems. The computer system, in fact, uses a
set of information objects to interface with heterogeneous information
sources. Information objects can be combined to form tasks that can be
added, deleted and modified without requiring any modifications to the
underlying program. In addition, the computer system allows users to
navigate through a task and automatically generates links to related
tasks based on the contextual information in which each step in the task
is performed. As a result, links to related tasks do not have to be
defined ahead of time, but rather can be dynamically generated at run
time. This is accomplished by associating a semantic type or multiple
semantic types with the information generated during each step. This
allows the system to present links to tasks that utilize the same
semantic types generated during the previous step. Thus, if a new task
that operates on a given semantic type is created, links to that task are
automatically generated during processing of related tasks without
requiring any modifications to the underlying program. Semantic types,
therefore, allow the system to capture, convert and integrate multiple
heterogeneous data sources that contain data pertaining to the same
entity. Furthermore, a graphical editor is provided that allows tasks to
be easily added, deleted or modified to adapt to changing business
processes without requiring new code to be written.