Best practice organisations have realised that people and their knowledge remain their greatest assets and will continue to be the largest contributory factor in obtaining future competitive advantage. Knowledge fundamentally derived from people in the absence of their understanding, personal context and application remains largely as obscure information. Current personal knowledge management (PKM) activities do not adequately support the finding, reminding, reuse and collaboration of information. In this paper we propose a novel PKM tool called SASA, a semi-automatic semantic annotator of PDF documents, which will enable collecting, connecting and collaborating of discovered information to facilitate knowledge sharing and personal content management within a business setting. SASA, a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat Professional, utilises Semantic Web technologies to enable building, augmenting and sharing of ontologies amongst knowledge workers. Within an ontology named entities are connected to additional information such as Web pages, documents, mail messages, personal notes, and wikis. SASA automatically derives the context of the document, highlights named entities and applies the relevant additional information. The business case for such a tool is outlined and user scenario development used to illustrate how SASA will assist Business Client Account Managers in the laborious process of reviewing, annotating and gathering information from customer documentation by enhancing their PKM.
In a rapidly changing global economy unified by improved
communication and transportation, people and their knowledge
are an organisation’s greatest assets [
Enabling technologies for the WWW have provided knowledge
workers with rich information sources but have also resulted in
adding to the existing considerable volume of information that
can be searched and queried. The classical Information Retrieval
(IR) problem of identification and retrieval of current information
for activities such as informed decision making remains
problematic. The core focus of PKM is directed at improving
individual efficiency. Current activities however remain limited
lacking adequate support for the finding, reminding, reuse and
collaboration of information [
The Semantic Web [
With the advent of the Semantic Web this paper examines how Semantic Web enabling technologies, namely semantic annotation can be applied to the area of PKM to enhance knowledge worker productivity and efficiency. This paper proposes a novel tool, SASA for semi-automatic semantic annotation of PDF documents, which will enable collecting, connecting and collaborating amongst knowledge workers to facilitate knowledge sharing and personal content management within a business setting.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 outlines the business case. Section 3 illustrates the scenario development. Section 4 presents our proposed solution. Section 5 compares related work. Section 6 concludes this paper and outlines future work.
HP4 Services’ Managed Services (MS) provides customers5 with strategic outsourcing services and solutions to manage their IT infrastructures. The MS business unit itself is structured into a number of areas of expertise known as towers. Each tower specializes in a particular area such as the End User Workplace Management (EUWM) which focuses on the end users desktop environment. The EUWM Pre-Sales & Implementation Team is assigned Customer Relationship Management and Project Management activities during the pre-sales and transition/transformation stages of any customer engagement. In each of the above activities, the EUWM consultant’s task of understanding, interpreting and producing all relevant support documentation is crucial for the successful proposal, implementation and delivery of any service. Failing to adequately capture all customer requirements, service limitations and any assumptions made will impact customer satisfaction level, the delivery organisations ability to succeed, HP’s profitability, and ultimately, HP’s ability to win further contracts. Underpinning all activities is the consultant whom has to ensure that services scoped in the solution are delivered efficiently and implemented in adherence to contractual obligations. For that reason, their resulted outputs from reviewing customer documentation such as Project Definition Document or Project Requirements Document are essential for the project to initially commence and to continue on-going successfully.
New EUWM customer undertaking will require the consultant to begin the laborious process of reviewing, annotating and gathering information from on average 50 or more substantial documents which typically are received in either Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF format. At present, each document is manually reviewed and annotated by the consultant. Central document repository systems such as SharePoint6 are occasionally used for information sharing in addition to documentation notes capture in an associated mail or Word documents. However, it is not a standard practice and can lead to problems of omitting key
5
Telecom/NSP, financial services, government or public sector markets. manufacturing and 6 SharePoint is Microsoft collaborative management tool for document and information sharing. comments that are difficult to identify and retrieve particularly for new document versions. Increasing the customer base, scope expansion, EUWM organisational expansion and having to comply with standards such as ISO7 frameworks has led to a considerable increase in documentation volume and the level of manual effort required.
There is a clear opportunity for an intuitive tool that would assist the consultants in performing documentation review and in information gathering process in order to improve both collaboration and traceability of document findings. Currently under active development SASA is such a tool that offers the semi-automatic semantic annotation of PDF documents. Its usage will contribute towards a reduction in the level of effort required in each new project stage, cost reduction and increased team productivity.
Take for example the situation where a EUWM client account manager has to prepare and deliver a Project Definition Document based on the requirements of the U.S. car manufacturing customer “Customer X”, and the capabilities of the delivery organisation and support structure. Material used in drawing this information together is contained in a large number of key business documents such as Statement of Work (SOW), HP Overall Scope document, Technical Solution Document (TSD), RCM Model, Overall HP-Customer Contract and Associated Schedules, Requests For Information (RFI), Requests For Proposals (RFP), etc.
The assigned account manager firstly accesses the transition\transformation and delivery documentation, begins the analysis process in an attempt to identify what is of relevance to the EUWM tower and what contractually HP are obliged to deliver. The Overall HP-Customer Contract is opened with Adobe Acrobat Professional and using our plug-in SASA creates the category8 “Customer X” for the customer and begins reviewing the documentation. With reference to Figure 1, when the account manager identifies an item of interest such as ‘Application Packaging’ it is added to the category as a named entity. A note of “Due to ITAR9 U.S. government regulations all Customer X transmissions must be manufactured within North America” is associated with that named entity. As the account managers’ analysis progresses, another document, which is part of the Associated Schedules documentation, is found to contain a key stipulation regarding where UNIX application packaging must be performed. Another note is then added to the named entity ‘Application Packaging’ along with a bookmark to document Schedule B, which was found to have the associated information. In this manner peripheral information obtained from sources such as emails, phones calls and HP-Customer group discussions can be used to filter information and associate it with suitable named entities. Once the document review stage has concluded the Project Definition Document write up commences. Resulting from the review the accounts manager now has in effect a semantically annotated information source.
Selection of the named entity ’Application Packaging’ will provide visibility of all additional information and annotations from previous documentation reviews. The client account manager also has the ability to view a summary of all the named entites and their associated information (see Figure 2). This assists the accounts manager in ensuring that issues regarding the like of UNIX application packaging and ITAR regulations are factored in and captured in the Project Definition Document. Otherwise the potential knock on effects of overlooking this information could adversely affect the project timeline, project scope, level of effort required, and delivery model with ultimately negative commercial impact.
Referring to Figure 3, the SASA application architecture will
contain: 1) A Trainer component to train SASA using the text
and the users’ selected ontology about the context of the currently
viewed PDF document. SASA will extract the text from the
document and use a Vector Space Model (VSM) [
SASA is implemented as a plug-in10 for Adobe Acrobat Professional. SASA adds a toolbar to the standard interface (see 10 A dynamically-linked extension to Acrobat, which hooks into the user interface and adds functionality to Acrobat Professional, Acrobat Standard, or Adobe Reader.
SemanticWord [
Adobe applications such as Acrobat, etc. 12
An algebraic model used for information filtering and
information retrieval.
ontology of the user’s choice to highlight and add links to named
entities on a Web page. Table 1 shows an extract from a recent
survey of semantic annotation tools. It was found that they cater
primarily for Web native formats such as HTML and XML.
SASA caters for PDF and can be integrated with HPs Mozilla
Firefox extension Trailblazer [
In this paper we have proposed a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat Professional called SASA, a novel PKM tool for semi-automatic semantic annotation of PDF documents utilising Semantic Web enabling technologies. SASA allows the user to build, augment and share ontologies amongst knowledge workers. Within an ontology named entities are connected to additional information such as Web pages, documents, mail messages, personal notes, and wikis. SASA automatically derives the context of the document, highlights named entities and applies the relevant additional information. The business case for such a tool is outlined and user scenario development used to illustrate how SASA will enhance PKM. Our future work plans, aside from continued implementation of our SASA plug-in, include detailed definition of the case study. We also plan to carry out a systematic user evaluation – with the help of Client Account Managers at HP Galway. Lastly, we are also working on semantically annotating a number of PDF documents at the one time and researching sub section document training.
We would like to thank Robert Connolly and Richard Joyce from the EUWM Pre-Sales & Implementation Team, Dara Keogh, and Colman O’Dywer from the Solutions Management Services Team at HP Galway for their time and expertise in framing the business case.