Leveraging passive paper piles to active objects in personal knowledge spaces

Abstract

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. © Springer-verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.