Heiko Maus

Information supply for business processes: coupling workflow with document analysis and information retrieval

Explicit modeling of business processes and their enactment in workflow systems have proved to be valuable in increasing the efficiency of work in organizations. We argue that enacted business processes — i.e. workflow management systems — form a solid basis for adequate information support in complex and knowledge-intensive business processes. To support this claim we demonstrate results from two different projects. The VirtualOffice approach employs workflow-context information to support high-precision document analysis and understanding in standard office settings; the combination of workflow context and document analysis allows for the automatic handling of incoming paper mail with respect to the appropriate workflows. The KnowMore approach focuses on the support of people who work on knowledge-intensive tasks by automatic delivery of relevant and goal-specific information. To this end, workflow context, an extended process model, and a detailed modeling of information sources are combined.

Semantic desktop 2.0: the Gnowsis experience

In this paper we present lessons learned from building a Semantic Desktop system, the gnowsis beta. On desktop computers, semantic software has to provide stable services and has to reflect the personal view of the user. Our approach to ontologies, the Personal Information Model PIMO allows to create tagging services like del.icio.us on the desktop. A semantic wiki allows further annotations. Continuous evaluations of the system helped to improve it. These results were created in the EPOS research project and are available in the open source projects Aperture, kaukoluwiki, and gnowsis and will be continued in the Nepomuk project. By using these components, other developers can create new desktop applications the web 2.0 way.

Workflow Context as a Means for Intelligent Information Support

The paper presents Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) as valuable information sources for context information for accomplishing intelligent information support. First, the main advantages of WfMS for retrieving context are presented. Two projects from our research department show different approaches for retrieving workflow context and enabling an intelligent information support. However, they have to cope with the absence of a comprehensive representation concept for workflow context in WfMS. To overcome this, this paper presents a comprehensive classification scheme for workflow context.

Integrationspotenziale für Geschäftsprozesse und Wissensmanagement

Seit Mitte der 90er Jahre gewinnt Wissensmanagement (WM) als ganzheitlicher Ansatz zur Verbesserung der Innovationsfahigkeit, der Prozesseffizienz und der Anpassungsfahigkeit an standig wechselnde Anforderungen zunehmende Bedeutung in Unternehmen und Organisationen (vgl. Nonaka u. Takeuchi 1997; Probst et al. 1997; Davenport u. Prusak 1998). Der vorliegende Sammelband konzentriert sich auf das „Geschaftsprozessorientierte Wissensmanagement“ und bereitet innovative Beratungsmethoden und Softwarelosungen, aktuellste Forschungsergebnisse, sowie Erfahrungen mit forschungsnahen Prototypen auf. Dabei wenden wir uns in Themenauswahl und -darstellung an Praktiker in Beratung, IT-Abteilungen und Management, bzw. an die praxisorientierte Lehre und die anwendungsorientierte Forschung. Das Buch soli diese neue Thematik so umfassend und wohlstrukturiert darstellen, wie dies derzeit mit praxisfahigen Ergebnissen moglich ist. Es soil konkret umsetzbare, gleichwohl methodisch durchdachte und wissenschaft lich abgesicherte Handreichungen geben, wie man durch Beachtung der Synergie von Wissens- und Geschaftsprozessmanagernent innovativere, okonomisch nutzbringendere und insgesamt erfolgversprechendere Projekte in diesem Bereich aufsetzen kann.

Leveraging corporate context within knowledge-based document analysis and understanding

Abstract. Knowledge-based systems for document analysis and understanding (DAU) are quite useful whenever analysis has to deal with the changing of free-form document types which require different analysis components. In this case, declarative modeling is a good way to achieve flexibility. An important application domain for such systems is the business letter domain. Here, high accuracy and the correct assignment to the right people and the right processes is a crucial success factor. Our solution to this proposes a comprehensive knowledge-centered approach: we model not only comparatively static knowledge concerning document properties and analysis results within the same declarative formalism, but we also include the analysis task and the current context of the system environment within the same formalism. This allows an easy definition of new analysis tasks and also an efficient and accurate analysis by using expectations about incoming documents as context information. The approach described has been implemented within the VOPR (VOPR is an acronym for the Virtual Office PRototype.) system. This DAU system gains the required context information from a commercial workflow management system (WfMS) by constant exchanges of expectations and analysis tasks. Further interaction between these two systems covers the delivery of results from DAU to the WfMS and the delivery of corrected results vice versa.

Leveraging passive paper piles to active objects in personal knowledge spaces

Office workers tend to produce paper piles of documents to read or to process sometime later. The information contained in these piles is often lost if it is not transferred to electronic format and connected to knowledge structures. Information that is not part of the knowledge worker’s electronic information space is frequently overlooked because it is not proactively provided during actual processes or tasks he is involved in. This paper presents a novel prototype for an intelligent office appliance, which results from an integration of three state-of-the-art office applications/appliances: a workflow system, a document classification system, and a multi-functional peripheral. The resulting system allows for leveraging an office worker’s papers to her personal knowledge space in order to realize a pro-active and context-sensitive information support within knowledge-intensive tasks and processes.

Weaving Personal Knowledge Spaces into Office Applications

The paper presents recent developments in our research on Semantic Desktop for personal knowledge management supported by an ecosystem of applications and plug-ins using the knowledge worker’s Personal Information Model (PIMO) – a formal representation of his mental model for knowledge work – in everyday applications. We explain how the infrastructure enables the availability of the PIMO as one vocabulary throughout different applications as well as mobile access, the importance of the mental model in the PIMO, and how to get direct benefits from the PIMO in daily activities. We also address steps towards building a Group Information Model from individual PIMOs within the ecosystem.

EPOS : evolving personal to organizational knowledge spaces

EPOS will leverage the user´s personal workspace with its manyfold native information structures to his personal knowledge space and in cooperation with other personal workspaces contribute to the organizational knowledge space which is represented in the organizational memory. This first milestone presents results from the project´s first year in the areas of the personal informational model, user observation for context elicitation, collaborative information retrieval and information visualization.

Diary generation from personal information models to support contextual remembering and reminiscence

Human remembering is a process vulnerable to producing errors in addition to unintentional forgetting which is often undesired. To support contextualised remembering and reminiscence we propose an application that is able to write diaries on demand. Without any considerable effort these diaries can be generated for every period of a persons life that is reflected in their personal information model. This model is a cornerstone of the Semantic Desktop approach which serves as the ecosystem that helps us realize our vision. In this paper, we describe our concept in more detail and also provide an overview of related diary and timeline applications. Additionally, we present a proof of concept implementation as well as results of an early user experience evaluation. Finally, we give an outlook on remaining challenges to be tackled as well as possible future work.

The Forgotten Needle in My Collections: Task-Aware Ranking of Documents in Semantic Information Space

With the growing amount of content stored in personal and organizational information spaces, finding and re-finding documents becomes both more crucial and challenging. In this work, we propose an approach to reduce information overload in navigation by automatically focusing on important documents, adaptively to the tasks at hand. Based on the idea of managed forgetting, we present a ranking method, which unifies activity logs and semantic information about documents into a common framework to identify important documents to the users current tasks. Our experiments on two real-world datasets, both collected from knowledge work activities in professional scenarios, show that our ranking approach outperforms the baseline methods for both subsequent access prediction and the effectiveness in ranking important documents. Furthermore, we implemented and demonstrated a system for decluttering information spaces as a proof of concept of our managed forgetting approach.