DYONIPOS: Proactive Support of Knowledge Workers

Introduction

Current Knowledge Management approach: a knowledge worker shortly wants to prepare an important topic but he neither knows where the according information is stored nor what colleagues he can ask for expertise. To get an overview about the topic, he normally proceeds in the following way: he successively searches in the available sources (server drive, own hard disk, internet, e-mail archive, specific applications, etc.) for important information with different “search tools”. Therefore he has to run each query individually. In addition he must know the various functionalities of the different “search tools”. Finally he has to screen the delivered search results if they adequately describe the relevant topic.

Knowledge Management with support of the DYONIPOS prototype: first of all the DYONIPOS knowledge worker has to start the DYONIPOS application manually because the automatical start is turned off due to privacy reasons. After activation of DYONIPOS, all keyboard entries and mouse moves are recorded as well as the reactions of the computer system. For instance, if the knowledge worker begins to create a power point presentation DYONIPOS is looking the knowledge worker over his shoulder. DYONIPOS calculates information needs to the entered words. The knowledge worker edits for example the title page for his presentation and writes “DYONIPOS (DYnamic ONtologybased Integrated Process OptimiSation): Effective and Efficient Knowledge Management science and research hand in hand”. DYONIPOS detects the knowledge needs, e.g.“DYONIPOS“, „Knowledge Management“ etc. In addition, DYONIPOS calculates so called “resources”. These are corresponding documents, PDF-files, links to websites, electronic record management data (ELAK) which cover the information needs. The knowledge worker gets these resources indicated only by request. In fact, constantly local and global search results are delivered only if the button for this function is pressed. Apart from this associated concepts of the topic and the detected information need are indicated. These are for example individuals or organizations which deal with this topic. Besides the proactive support, DYONIPOS also offers active search for information.

This is done similar to conventional search tools via entering of a search item in a search window. Moreover DYONIPOS enriches the further handling and analysis of the indicated search results. For example important key words can be displayed which represent the content of the knowledge resource as well as association graphs that visualizes the relations of the associated concepts. DYONIPOS also classifies the detected resources and visualize them in topic landscapes. In these topic landscapes, thematically similar resources are mapped closer together. Trough the use of DYONIPOS knowledge workers get an impression of the content of search results without having ever read them. Furthermore, existing knowledge in an organization becomes available, transparent and semantically enriched.