Oleg Rostanin

Touch & Write: a multi-touch table with pen-input

In this paper we present a novel rear-projection tabletop called Touch & Write. It combines the FTIR technology for touching with the Anoto-technology for handwriting. This allows an implicit switch between the modes object manipulation, and content editing. Our system incorporates real-time gesture and handwriting recognition. Drawn objects and written concepts can be converted to digital information immediately. We introduce a functional application, the LeCoOnt concept mapping software makes use of the full capability of the Touch & Write table. Touching actions are used for arranging the concepts like sheets on a normal table, and to recognizes guestures like zooming. Pen-actions are used for drawing, connecting concepts, and handwriting. The handwritten strokes are automatically recognized and converted into a machine-readable string. This system provides a reliable alternative to common approaches which try to reconstruct the information from photographs.

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.

Seamless integration of order processing in MS outlook using smartoffice: an empirical evaluation

MS Outlook is currently the most widespread e-mail client in corporate environments. However, e-mail management with MS Outlook is usually decoupled from enterprise processes, making it difficult to synchronize e-mails and attachments with currently running processes. In this paper, we introduce SmartOffice - an extension for MS Outlook allowing the seamless integration of e-mail management with enterprise workflows, thus increasing the effectiveness of e-mail processing as well as coupling process-relevant e-mails and documents with the respective process instances. SmartOffice was integrated with a legacy system supporting the import management process of a large German retailer. We evaluated the SmartOffice integration in an empirical study in the context of the import process, using real data, and with the employees of the retailers import office. We conducted a semi-structured interview, where one participant answered questions after solving three typical tasks and surveyed a group after a presentation and demonstration of SmartOffices functionality. The results show that SmartOffice has high potential for being introduced in the process with high efficiency and high user acceptance. Although the number of participants was low, the results are considered very relevant from the perspective of the domain experts, since the study took place in an industrial setting.

SWord: semantic annotations revisited

Using semantic annotations to support knowledge intensive office work is an important trend in knowledge management since the last decade. Although standards for semantic mark-up such as RDFa were introduced for annotating XML-based resources, a standardized approach to combining unstructured data from office desktop documents with highly-structured semantic annotations still does not exist. This paper presents an add-in for MS Word allowing to seamlessly integrate semantic categorizations within MSWord documents. The SWord plugin assists user in categorizing Word documents and their parts by assigning them semantic categories from a lightweight knowledge base. Semantic categories are used for convenient navigation in large documents as well as means for better document organization and refinding when using standard Windows Desktop Search tool.

Using concept maps to improve proactive information delivery in TaskNavigator

During the last decade, a plenty of approaches for intelligent user assistance in knowledge intensive working environments were developed. These solutions vary from a lightweight proactive information delivery (PID) based on a non-intrusive user observation to workflow-based assistance that requires formal modeling of processes, organizations, knowledge domains and task specific information needs. Whereas lightweight solutions have low precision and sometimes yet increase the users information overflow, approaches based on sophisticated modeling have severe problems with bootstrapping and maintenance. The work presented in the current paper aims to find an optimal integrated solution for user assistance in agile knowledge working environments that exploits a lightweight incremental modeling of task relevant knowledge and process know-how using concept maps and concept-based task tagging to improve the quality of PID results. The feasibility of the described approach was proved during the joint research project TaskNavigator conducted by Ricoh Co. Ltd and DFKI GmbH.