=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-34/paper-14
|storemode=property
|title=Context Framework - an Open Approach to Enhance Organisational Memory Systems with Context Modelling Techniques
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-34/klemke.pdf
|volume=Vol-34
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/pakm/Klemke00
}}
==Context Framework - an Open Approach to Enhance Organisational Memory Systems with Context Modelling Techniques==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-34/klemke.pdf
Context Framework - an Open Approach to Enhance
Organisational Memory Systems with Context Modelling Techniques
Roland Klemke
GMD - German National Research Center for Information Technology GmbH
Institute for Applied Information Technology
Schloß Birlinghoven, D-53754 Sankt Augustin
Roland.Klemke@gmd.de
expertise) [Rac 1997]. Some philosophers even deny the
existence of a context-independent meaning of concepts
Abstract [Hei 1962].
Even though context is recognised as being very
Researchers from various fields (among which important, research concerning context (especially in the
are Artificial Intelligence, Computer Supported area of organisational memories) is in its very early
Co-operative Work, Information Retrieval, stages. It is not yet agreed in the scientific community
Software Engineering, and Knowledge what context is and which elements of context are
Engineering) try to address issues in important within organisational settings. It is still an open
Organisational Memories (OM). Many of these field how to represent contextual information and how to
approaches also identify the meaning of context use contextual information for reasoning purposes.
for information captured inside an OM. Up to This paper gives an overview on the state of the art in
now context has not been modelled explicitly as organisational memory research with a special focus on
part of an OM. This paper gives an overview of the concept of context and develops a framework on how
different approaches in OM research and to recognise, represent and use contextual information
proposes research for recognising, modelling, and within an organisational memory application.
retrieving contextual information as part of the The main question behind the presented approach is
OM. The main question behind the presented whether knowledge about the creation or usage context of
approach is whether knowledge about the any piece of information within the organisational
creation or usage context of any piece of memory and knowledge about the current context of any
information within the organisational memory organisational member may be used to effectively enhance
and knowledge about the current context of any the individual's access to organisational information.
organisational member may be used to effectively Gathered contextual knowledge may be used to
enhance the individual's access to organisational automatically offer information related to the current
information. context (by identifying similar contexts and information
created within). Retrieval techniques may be enhanced by
1 Introduction extending queries with explicit information on past
contexts.
Context has been recognised by a wide range of
researchers as being an important concept to consider 2 State of the Art in Organisational
when looking at the meaning of information. Memory & Context Research
Psychologists perform memory tests to analyse the effect
of context for the remembrance of words [Sri 1997], Generally, an organisational memory (OM) comprises the
Researchers in the machine learning area investigate the complete knowledge of an organisation collected over the
effects of context on the automatic learning of concepts time of its existence. It consists of personal memories of
and deliver promising results [MK 1996], Organisational people working in the organisation (i. e. their knowledge,
Research people use communication models to investigate experiences, expertise), document archives (both
the role of context in information product evaluation [Mur electronic and paper-based), and all further relevant
1996], and cognitive scientists stress the importance of pieces of knowledge that are important for organisational
context for human expertise (and consequently machine success. In this paper we will use the term organisational
memory in a more restricted form: OM is seen
The copyright of this paper belongs to the paper’s authors. Per mission to copy
synonymously to computerised organisational memory
without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not applications. The goal of such applications is to capture
made or distributed for direct commercial advantage. knowledge or information within an organisation and
Proc. of the Third Int. Conf. on Practical Aspects of distribute it to the workers who need it. It is the overall
Knowledge Management (PAKM2000) goal of organisational memory systems to improve the
Basel, Switzerland, 30-31 Oct. 2000, (U. Reimer, ed.) competitiveness of an organisation by improving the way
in which it manages its knowledge [HSK 1996].
http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-34/ In the following sections we will review several
R. Klemke 14-1
approaches to OM stemming from very different research information describing the message content, thus allowing
directions and following different goals. We review these contextual organisation of messages.
approaches with respect to their notion of context. Table 1 A second approach (Project Compendium, also
summarises these reviews defining the underlying reported in [ZS 1997]) is aimed to capture formal
contextual features and models. documents (e.g. project reports). Project Compendium
creates/maintains a hypertext space of documents of
2.1 Help Systems different formats/origins allowing to associate documents
with each other. This hypertext space serves as a basis for
One of the first published OM systems was Answer
”Conversational Modelling”, a technique that is motivated
Garden (Ackermann, [Ack 1994a], [Ack 1994b], [AM
by the observation that modelling tasks performed by
1990], [AM 1996]) which aimed to provide a
teams consist to a great extent of discussion, argument,
continuously growing repository of hierarchically
brainstorming, etc. From a different perspective these
structured questions and answers including
hyperlinks may also be seen as document context, as all
communication means to route unanswered questions to
links pointing to a single document can be seen as the
domain experts. Goals of this approach were to make
context in which this document is embedded.
recorded knowledge retrievable and to make people with
An approach that introduces explicitly contextualised
knowledge accessible . Later versions of Answer Garden
information to the CSCW domain is described in [Pri
were expanded with regard to the use of different means
1993] (TOSCA). Here, an organisational information
to get questions answered: browse through previously
server that models organisational entities (people,
answered questions, chat, news groups, help desk, etc.
projects, departments, tasks, ...) as interrelated objects is
The external communication means were used only to put
described. Different views may be generated on
questions there, they were not used to retrieve or archive
organisational information and relations between
previously answered similar questions.
organisational objects may be followed. Presented
Ackermann identifies contextual problems within OM
information is always contextualised (creation context,
by showing a trade-off between too much (non
e.g. department or project) and communication means
generalisable) and too little (non understandable) context
allow contextualised discussion about & annotation of
information. His idea is to ”strip away” contextual
objects. As weak point of this approach one may see that
information from documents stored within the OM to
explicit organisational modelling is required a priori
identify the general (= reusable) part of it and to provide
which may lead to outdated organisational structures and
explicit contextual information in a simple form (such as
context models. Another problem is that the
submission date and author).
contextualised information can only be found by users
The use of one (dynamically growing) categorisation
who move to the appropriate context. Thus only retrieval
hierarchy (i.e. a question hierarchy) classifying questions
by ”matching context” (as opposed to the explicit retrieval
and answers makes retrieval using Answer Garden
of documents in a certain context) is supported.
difficult as it does not allow different views on the
categorised information. Every user, regardless of his/her
2.3 Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering,
context, expertise, interest, etc. viewed the same answers
Knowledge Management
to the same questions using the same hierarchy (that,
needless to say, grows a bit unmanageable in time). The An approach to an OM for knowledge workers that tries
question & answer based approach makes Answer Garden to capture the history of decision processes is presented in
a tool to be used in helpdesk applications rather than in [Buc 1997]. The author characterises knowledge work
general OM applications. using a definition of tame and wicked problems and offers
an approach for argumentation visualisation. The history
2.2 Computer Supported Co-operative Work leading to a decision provides the context in which this
decision is made. A drawback of this approach is that the
Some approaches to OM have been reported from CSCW
visualisation of even a simple decision may look quite
research. OM in these areas often is called group memory
complex. This problem increases with complex decisions,
underlining the informal character of supported user
where many people are involved. It also requires
groups. One approach that archives e-mail
discussions (and consequently decisions) to be explicitly
communications (Knowledge Depot) is reported in [KZR
documented using the presented approach, which leads to
1997] and [ZS 1997]. This work identifies the concept of
additional effort and cognitive load.
”Project Awareness” which comprises the awareness of
Van Heijst, van der Spek, & Kruizinga [HSK 1996]
discussions, decisions, and changes during project work.
define corporate memories as an explicit, disembodied,
Knowledge Depot organises the group memory into
persistent representation of the knowledge and
dynamically refinable hierarchical sections (just like
information in an organisation that should support the
Answer Garden) and classifies incoming e-mails based on
basic knowledge processes (develop new knowledge,
subject-line keywords. Users may now browse through the
secure new and existing knowledge, distribute knowledge,
archive or trigger selected sections to be automatically
combine available knowledge). They aim to develop a
informed about incoming mails or search the archive
knowledge pump , i.e. a corporate memory that allows
using keywords. If the user community agrees on a subject
active collection and distribution of knowledge. They
naming policy, these subject lines may contain contextual
propose the use of knowledge profiles for every user as to
R. Klemke 14-2
identify relevant knowledge objects within the memory. grappling with problems of OM. [KO 1997] offers a
These profiles which can be seen as simple context matrix-based information retrieval approach to OM
models are manually constructed and maintained by the document retrieval and resource allocation using
users themselves (which may be seen as the weak point of relevance ranking and associative retrieval. The idea
this approach: the maintenance effort may be eschewed by behind this approach is to identify all relevant concepts
the users). (terms) in a domain and set up a concept vector. Every
In [ABHKS 1998], [AAST 1998] & [BHS 1998] OM document is then represented by a relevance vector d with
is seen as an enterprise-internal application-independent |d| = #concepts resulting in a matrix. A single entry in this
information and assistant system that integrates various matrix denotes the occurrence of concept i in document j.
techniques and tools to support knowledge management . Matrix operations allow the calculation of ”similarity
The presented approach is based on enterprise-, domain-, measures” between documents and the ranking of
and information-ontologies used to classify the archived documents with respect to certain concepts. An interesting
information where the enterprise-ontology classifies aspect of this approach is that the ”document similarity
contextual information, the domain-ontology classifies measures” allows the ranking of documents as relevant
information content and the information-ontology even when they don't contain the queried terms. The
classifies structure. The enterprise ontology may be used calculated matrix implicitly relates all concepts and thus
to generate a context model for classified information that provides a context for each possible search term. The a
describes the organisational context in which the priori definition of relevant concepts may be seen as
information has been created. As context modelling is not shortcoming of this approach which may lead to
the main focus of this research only organisational context maintenance problems in dynamic environments.
is regarded here, which itself is reduced to a process A further approach from IR research focusing on the
oriented context view. use of context is described in [Gök 1999]. The proposed
[Schwa 1998] proposes the use of user centric meta research utilises Machine Learning techniques to learn
knowledge in organisational memories by enhancing plain user context by observing subsequent queries. An existing
text e-mails with links to appropriate concepts within the ”ContextLearner” component (of which no further details
OM. In this approach the OM is considered to comprise are provided) shall be used in this project. A major
two parts: a knowledge base containing organisational difference between context approaches in OM and IR is
knowledge and meta-knowledge used to process the that IR systems (as the nature of things demands it) only
knowledge. Meta-knowledge is considered to be user regard the user context at retrieval time, while OM offers
centric and is used to identify relevant concept the possibility to enhance the contained information with
descriptions in the form of user-profiles and shared context. Another issue is that an IR system cannot make
semantics. User-profiles are used as more or less static any assumptions about the users work environment while
user information (regarding e.g. position, current & past an OM will usually be embedded into an organisation's
projects, ...) while shared semantics are concept work environment which may provide rich context
descriptions that a user can ascribe to or not. All users information.
who ascribe to the same description of a concept are
believed to share the same view of that concept. In this 2.5 Organisational Learning
approach users are required to actively ascribe to concepts
An approach that covers personalisation issues in OM
which have to be defined a priori. Thus it is questionable
research is presented in a research proposal [FOS 1997].
whether in an environment of ever increasing amounts of
The authors try to investigate three main OM issues: how
concepts users are willed to keep their concept views up
to capture knowledge; how to sustain timeliness & utility;
to date.
and how to deliver actively and adaptively . Their research
In [MSPK 2000] a knowledge management approach is
aims to support software development groups and is based
described that uses ontology-based domain modelling
on results of a previous project [Lin 1996] where
techniques. The used ontology allows inheritance and
complexity in design is analysed (concerning the synthesis
instance-of relations to be modelled. It is built on concepts
of different perspectives, the increasing amount of
and instances and allows attribute-based, concept-based
information relevant to a design task and the
and text-based queries. Documents are manually enriched
understanding of previous design decisions). A framework
(contextualised) with concepts from the domain model. In
for a group memory feedback loop is presented that tries
the presented modelling approach only instance-of and
to tackle two disparate goals: support for the current
inheritance relations are supported. Especially
design work at hand & support to record information for
containment and general association relations are missing.
future reuse. GIMMe (Group Interactive Memory
Furthermore the underlying definition of context is not
Manager), an e-mail-based tool to capture, store, organise,
clearly stated. The enrichment of documents with domain
share and retrieve conversations is presented. Similar to
concepts is simply called contextualisation.
[KZR 1997] GIMMe organises e-mails according to their
A comprehensive survey of knowledge engineering
subject lines.
approaches may be found in [SBF 1998].
2.6 Software Engineering
2.4 Information Retrieval, Text Filtering
The Software Engineering community also offers
The information retrieval community has also been
R. Klemke 14-3
approaches to KM and OM problems. Maurer & Dellen context to the notion of ”current workflow task”-context
[MD 1998] present an approach for process oriented and ”reflection on workflow”-context.
knowledge management where information need and Another approach of integrating OM and WMS is
knowledge provision are dependent on the process presented in [KS 2000]. The central idea is the explicit
context. Their approach is related to the ”experience representation of mnemonic processes (i.e. processes to
factory” approach [BCR 1994] that tries to package create, use and maintain knowledge) as business
software development experience. Maurer & Dellen processes. The underlying hypothesis is that business
present a process modelling approach that connects processes involving people and technology form that part
documents to processes instead of using formal of the OM promising best utilisation of resources.
classification & retrieval methods. While the connection Consequently, capturing and accessing OM should
of documents with process states offers interesting concentrate on these processes. The presented work
retrieval capabilities it is also the weak point of this adopts Takeuchi and Nonaka's modes of knowledge
approach: only the exactly matching process context will conversion (socialisation, externalisation, combination,
provide the right information, no explicit context model is and internalisation) and outlines the following process:
maintained that might allow similarity measures and no identify core business processes; identify corresponding
context-free retrieval (e.g. using keywords) is supported. people and agents; get descriptions for processes by
The idea behind this approach is quite similar to the process members; use mnemonic process knowledge
already discussed approach in [Pri 1993], where creation to externalise process, agent, and tool
organisational structures are used instead of software representations; empower people in training sessions to
engineering process models to identify context. use the system; and finally run the system to build
knowledge. The modelling approach in this work is based
2.7 Workflow on the identification of business process models as
primary objects and the identification of knowledge
[Wol 1997] offers an approach to use explicit enterprise
creator, knowledge user, expert, and knowledge
models to circumvent the drawbacks of standard
administrator as knowledge agents. Context is not
information filtering methods in the distribution of
explicitly mentioned here but as business process models
corporate information. This quite interesting approach to
can be seen as context models for business process
precise information distribution based on enterprise
execution it seems clear, that explicitly but manually
models (thus providing some usage context) is limited to
created context models are maintained by this approach.
organisations with explicitly modelled, stable and reliable
communication structures and responsibilities. In this
2.8 Virtual Enterprise
approach information items get distributed within an
organisation based on the organisational roles that people A virtual enterprise (VE) is an organisation comprising
have and their relations to the organisational process that different people of different (physical) organisations to
created the information. reach a dedicated goal in a limited period of time. As such
Another work focused on highly structured application a VE is comparable to a project consortium. After the goal
domains (here: insurance companies) is [Rei 1998], where is reached, a VE stops to exist. Approaches that try to
the author tries to combine (integrate) several knowledge support VE and research communities with OM
bases using knowledge formalisms. Their understanding technology can e found in [DCGR 1998], [RM 1998], &
of OM is based on the perception of two roles: (1) OM [GS 1997].
acts as a passive container for relevant organisational Based on a corporate memory typology offered in
knowledge; (2) OM acts as an active distributor for [DCGR 1998], [RM 1998] offers an analysis of the CM
information needed in the task at hand. To reach the need of a VE exemplified for the domain of concurrent
second role the author states, that the OM needs to know engineering (CE). Two levels of tasks in concurrent
what the user is currently doing. He thus proposes the engineering are identified: individual design and co-
integration of OM with a WMS which provides process operative evaluation. To support these tasks a corporate
context. memory designed for a VE should be composed of a
An approach that tries to put dynamics into the context profession memory (capturing knowledge about people,
based information distribution of OM is presented in expertise, professions), a project definition memory
[WWT 1998]. The authors try to integrate OM with an (capturing requirements & results), and a project design
evolutionary workflow management system. The WMS rationale memory (keeping components, conflicts,
stores completed processes in a case base providing problems, solving methods, arguments).
access to best (and worst) practices and lessons learned Some open issues remain unanswered (and even
(inner feedback loop: learning how to optimise process unidentified) by the authors: Why should one set up an
execution) and providing the possibility to reflect on OM for a limited period VE when the effort of creating
process models and modify them (outer feedback loop: and maintaining an OM only pays off in the long run?
learning how to improve process models). During Which members of the VE own the OM? The members of
execution of processes and tasks the WMS gives access to a VE may have the same strategic goal but do they share
task specific documents and information items. An ”out of the same interest? Do they want their expertise to be
context” information need, that exists outside a modelled shared with other VE members?
process is not supported by this approach. Also, it limits An approach that is oriented towards the support of
R. Klemke 14-4
research communities is presented in [GS 1997]. Though characteristics) in order to evaluate its relevance in a
research communities are no virtual enterprises they share given situation.
some commonalties: distributed over the whole world,
working in closely related areas, interested in fast and 3 Context Modelling
efficient knowledge exchange. [GS 1997] proposes
In this section we will show some theoretical backgrounds
knowledge management through capturing of live events
of our context modelling work and motivate the
(such as conferences) in hypermedia (WWW, CD-ROM,
underlying goals. We will then use the results from the
...). Papers presented should be enriched by video
state of the art review to derive context modelling
captures of presentations. Electronic conference
requirements.
proceedings could then benefit from the technological
advantages of linking text documents with picture, sound,
3.1 Background and Goals
and video material.
Knowledge management is concerned with data,
2.9 Our Previous Work - Information Brokering information and knowledge. Following Alavi and Leidner
and Organisational Memories [AL 1999], we define data as raw unstructured symbols
(such as text and numbers). Information is defined as
In a previous project (COBRA - Common Open
processed, conceptualised and categorised data.
Brokerage Architecture, [KK 1999], [SMDP 1998]) we
Knowledge is information that is made actionable by
aimed to support the work of professional information
being contextualised and personalised. The three levels
brokers with specific information systems. We built an
and their transitions are shown in fig. 1.
organisational memory system (called bizzyB) supporting
them in their daily work by integrating customer, case and
profile management with automatic information retrieval
no
ati
tua &
from various heterogeneous information sources.
lis
ep n
nc atio
Co rso
The information objects a broker has to deal with
Pe
nte nal
Co plic
(namely customer data, case data, profile data, and
xtu isat
Knowledge
Ex
ali ion
dossiers built from retrieved information) were organised
sa
tio
along their context of use. A broker working with a
tio n
n&
isa tio
customer's profile could then for instance easily access all
n
or lisa
automatically delivered information for this profile.
teg ua
Information
Ca cept
During the evaluation phase of the COBRA project this
n
context-based information organisation proved to be a
Co
&
useful concept. The underlying model of context used in
this approach was a priori modelled and based on our
Data
analysis of the working situation of an information broker.
In bizzyB we did not use automatic context observation
techniques. Rather the user had to explicitly „move“ to the
desired context instead of the system recognising it. This Figure 1. Data, information, and knowledge
again proved to be useful for our application domain, as
the set of different contexts the user community covers is An organisational memory aims to support the efficient
reasonably small. and effective sharing of organisational information and
One of the disadvantages of not using explicit context knowledge. To address issues like information overload, it
models was that the system could not perform any kind of is necessary to condense any information given to a
reasoning on context similarity. The user had to remember certain person by personalising and contextualising it.
herself, that she has already been in a similar context and This paper covers the problem of supporting
move to it in order to reuse information already created. contextualisation and personalisation through explicit and
Another problem was that the approach was not very comprehensive context modelling techniques. We strongly
flexible: a change in the work environment had to be believe that context modelling techniques help to decrease
reflected in software changes. Furthermore in this an individuals information overload by delivering a
approach we only regarded process-oriented context decreased amount of information of higher quality (where
information, while ignoring other probably important we define the quality of information as its usefulness
contextual dimensions. within the current context).
In a previous paper [Kle 1999] we already presented
first ideas towards the design of a context enhanced 3.2 Requirements
organisational memory. In the following we will build on
Table 1 summarises the reviews from the previous
these ideas and present latest results.
sections with respect to the identified contextual features
In an other paper (see [JKN 2001] ) we offer an
and the underlying (implicit or explicit) model of context.
information brokering centred view on knowledge
Many approaches recognise context as being a concept of
management. There we identify contextualisation as an
major importance. But as no consensus on what context is
important task that annotates information with contextual
exists in the research community we can observe that
information (domain knowledge and situational
R. Klemke 14-5
Table 1. Context Features and Context Modelling.
Work Feature taken as context How context is modelled
[Ack 1994a] Simple features like submission date or author Manually provide simple meta-information
[KZR 1997], [ZS Content descriptors provide context E-mail classification & hypertext for “conversational
1997] modelling”
[Pri 1993] Creation context of entities (department, project) Annotation as contextualisation
based on organisational structure
[Buc 1997] History of decision processes Argumentation visualisation
[HSK 1996] Employees knowledge descriptors Manually constructed knowledge profiles
[ABHKS 1998] Organisational structure Enterprise ontology
[Schwa 1998] User centric meta-knowledge User profiles & shared semantics
[MSPK 2000] Domain concepts from domain ontology Domain ontology; manual concept selection
[KO 1997] Concept relations Matrix-based relation calculation
[Gök 1999] History of IR system usage Learned through machine learning
[FOS 1997] Conceptualised e-mails Conversation modelling
[MD 1998] Processes to which documents are linked Process modelling
[Wol 1997] Organisational roles and process relations Enterprise modelling
[Rei 1998] Workflow process context Integration of OM and WMS
[WWT 1998] Workflow process context Evolutionary WMS
[KS 2000] Knowledge creation & use processes Business process models
[GS 1997] Captured live events related to papers Association of papers and multimedia data
[KK 1999] Information Brokering Process Process Modelling and Process Context Visualisation
concentrate on one or two of the contextual aspects
Process (e.g. Workflow)
presented there. We feel a strong need to look at context
Organisational
Structure (e.g. Enterprise more comprehensively, which leads us to:
Ontolgy)
Requirement 1: A context modelling framework
Domain Ontology has to identify all relevant contextual dimensions.
Domain/Content
based What does requirement 1 mean? Context may be defined
Knowledge Profiles
as “any information that can be used to characterise the
Context
situation of an entity; an entity is a person, place, or
User Profiles / User Models object that is considered relevant to the interaction
Personal between a user and an application, including the user and
Interest Profiles
applications themselves” [DA 1999]. The amount of
Location
information that could possibly characterise a given
Physical situation is obviously far too big to be handled.
Time Additionally, some potentially relevant contextual
dimensions are hard to identify automatically or even hard
Figure 2. Context Typology to be explicated at all (e.g. the current personal mood or
the intention behind a certain action).
every approach focuses on a special aspect of context. Therefore we require a set of relevant contextual
Based on the different aspects of context being dimensions which:
modelled by different approaches we found in the are of relevance to characterise a situation (i.e. it
literature and based on our own experience, we have successfully allows to distinguish different situations)
defined a context typology for working contexts as can be explicated
depicted in figure 2. Most of the reviewed works can be (semi-) automatically identified
R. Klemke 14-6
are sufficiently small in number to allow efficient Some approaches that associate information with
storage and retrieval organisational models, software engineering process
allow the definition of a set or range of possible values models or general workflow process models have already
of sufficient accuracy been discussed above (see [MD 1998], [Pri 1993], [WWT
allow the measurement of the similarity of each pair of 1998], & [Wol 1997]). These approaches have shown that
values for a given dimension. information may be retrieved context-based (i.e. a user
who is in a similar context can view, browse or retrieve
While in [AMGPS 1996] organisational context is defined
the contextualised information). None of these approaches
along three dimensions ( organisation dimension, process
however, maintains an explicit context model that would
dimension, space dimension ) each of which is further
allow additional retrieval strategies (e.g. match query &
hierarchically refined in [Len 1998] twelve dimensions for
similar context, match query & complementary context,
describing contexts are identified in the background of
match query only, or match context only). This leads us
modelling and reasoning within real world knowledge.
to:
We define a dimension as relevant if it allows to
separate information into groups that literally “make Requirement 3: Context-based and content-based
sense”. Consequently, “outside temperature” is probably retrieval of information have to be possible
not a relevant organisational dimension while “time” and independent of each other as well as in
“process” are. Additionally, a relevant dimension needs to combination.
be easily explicable to be included in the set of
While the a priori modelling of contexts (and the
represented dimensions. This strongly relates to the notion
corresponding implementation mechanisms to exploit
of explicit and tacit knowledge [Non 1994], where
context information in an information system) is the right
externalisation (i.e. the transformation of tacit knowledge
approach for a domain with clearly structured work
into explicit knowledge) is an essential part in the process
processes that remain stable over a long period of time
of corporate knowledge creation. We believe, that only
(like information brokering), we now feel a strong need
some parts of existing tacit knowledge can easily be
towards more flexible approaches for other domains.
explicated.
Also, we think that a useful system should automatically
Approaches in the IR community that try to make use
recognise the users current context, to be able to provide
of context knowledge to improve retrieval results have
possibly needed information created in similar contexts
been discussed above. They vary from long term user
immediately. Thus the fourth requirement is:
interest profiles (created explicitly by the user) to
regarding the users retrieval history (observed Requirement 4: Automatic recognition of context
automatically by the retrieval system) and similar should be done as well as giving users the
approaches. All of these have in common that they only possibility to explicitly provide context
look at the consumption side of the information retrieval information (thus simulating a certain context).
process to make use of context. The production /
provision side is not considered in these approaches. For 4 Architecture
general purpose IR systems an approach to
Based on the requirements defined above we now
contextualisation of information at provision time would
describe our architectural approach in more detail.
not be appropriate as producers and consumers of
Therefore we outline possible contents of organisational
information are separated groups which presumably
context models, followed by a description of our
makes their context incomparable. This situation changes
architecture giving an overview over the ContextService
when we look at OM, which can be seen as special kind of
and ContextAgent components (see figure 3).
IR systems. OM contain information produced and
consumed by the same group of people: the members of
4.1 Content of context models
the organisation. Thus they share the same range of
possible contexts. This leads us to the next requirement: Based on requirement 1 and our definition of relevance of
Requirement 2: In a context-enhanced a context dimension we will now identify basic
organisational memory system, context dimensions of context that we think are important for
knowledge has to be associated to information at organisational context:
production and consumption time and has to be A person is uniquely identified by an ID and/or a
used during information retrieval. name. A person's context is further characterised by
This requirement is based on the idea that knowledge her position within the organisation, her roles, her
about the current context of a user may be used for at least skills, her interests and experience.
two purposes: A location a person works at is not only characterised
by its co-ordinates ( absolute location ) but also by
to enhance any information currently created, further characteristics as name (e.g. Room number)
modified, published, or used by the current user and and function ( type of location, e.g. Office vs. Meeting
to offer possibly useful information created, modified, room)
or published in contexts similar to the current user's A point in time may simply be described as absolute
one. time but further characteristics are important for its
R. Klemke 14-7
contextual description: e.g. something happened on a
Monday morning ( type of time ), or something
User
happened two hours before something else ( relative Environment
time)
An activity describes what someone is currently doing.
ContextAgent
This is defined by the task a person has to fulfil (e.g.
embedded in a workflow process), by the tools used to
fulfil the task, by files opened and further
characteristics Organisational
ContextService
Memory
Through ontological refinement and association these
basic dimensions cover all identified contextual aspects
from the identified context typology in figure 1. Each of
the attributes that further define the basic context Domain CM/OM Context
dimensions can be of different types: they either are Contents Bridge Models
represented by primitive values (like a timestamp, an ID,
or a name) or they may be represented using complex
values (e.g. a categorisation hierarchy to classify Figure 3. Context Framework Architecture
organisational roles or interests). We use a fully
implemented ontology-based knowledge modelling tool associate document identifiers (URLs) with context
(Broker’s Lounge, see [JKN 2001] for a detailed models.
discussion) that offers a flexible and user friendly ContextService offers an API which can be used to
approach to model complex knowledge structures. The store new context models, retrieve stored ones, associate
main benefit of using Broker’s Lounge is, that it offers a new document identifiers with contexts and perform
type-based ontology-modelling approach that allows to context-based document retrieval. In particular, the
create multi-dimensional knowledge models. We use this following API functions are offered:
approach to model the relevant contextual dimensions we similar: ContextModel -> {ContextModel 1, ...,
identified. Additionally, Broker’s Lounge offers a ContextModeln}, delivers a set of ContextModels that
separate knowledge structuring level (categorisation level) are similar to the given one
which we use to express similarities among different getDoc: ContextModel -> {DocID 1, ..., DocID n},
elements of the ontology. It is out of the scope of this delivers the set of document identifiers being
paper to provide further detail about the underlying associated with the given ContextModel
approaches of the Broker’s Lounge environment. getContext: DocID -> {ContextModel 1, ...,
ContextModeln}, delivers the set of ContextModels
4.2 The Context Framework Architecture being associated with the given document identifier
It is our aim to provide a component-based system that addDoc: ContextModel, DocID -> Ø, associates a
can be easily integrated with existing intranet-based ContextModel with a document identifier, i.e. stores
information systems. Therefore we impose only simple the ContextModel and creates an association of
requirements to the existing environment: documents have ContextModel and DocID in the CM/OM Bridge. The
to be identifiable using URLs and these URLs have to CM/OM Bridge is required to maintain the
remain stable throughout the document lifetime. A URL independence of ContextService from the chosen OM.
does not necessarily point to a pure HTML document, any Especially the API function “similar” is of importance: it
other kind of document format is supported as well (as must be possible to retrieve similar context models from
well as dynamic query URLs). the potentially huge collection in an efficient way. The
In the following we will describe two central retrieval of similar context models is complicated by the
components of the Context Framework: ContextService complex nature of the models. As we have seen in the
and ContextAgent. ContextService is a background previous section, context models are multi-dimensional
component that manages all existing context models and each dimension may have a hierarchic (topological)
within the organisation and offers an API for retrieval and structure, that makes the design of similarity measures a
storage of context models while ContextAgent is the main non-trivial task. In our current implementation we use a
component for handling user interaction, automatic combination of a weighted distance measure for the final
context observation and interaction with the user's distance calculation and separate distance measures for
environment. each dimension.
The similarity measure for the time dimension is a
4.2.1 ContextService combination of an absolute distance measure and a type of
The ContextService component stores all known context time similarity measure. The type of time measure tries to
models in a database. It is responsible for maintaining the find structural commonalties within two points in time
history of context models for every user within the (e.g. both values represent a Monday morning but within
organisation. Furthermore it offers the possibility to different weeks). Location similarity is calculated as
combination of absolute spatial distance and type of place
R. Klemke 14-8
similarity. Type of place similarity calculates the semantic organisational models. Further organisational information
distance of two places (assuming that a location's semantic sources (e.g. organisational people database) offer more
is its role e.g. as office or meeting room). The type of or less stable data about the user, e.g. information about
place similarity measure is based on a taxonomic her position & roles may be collected. Information about
description of all available types of places within an the highly dynamic current context is more difficult to
organisation. Similarity measures for persons and extract, as reliable, quality controlled entries in databases
activities are based on semantic distance calculation of are no useful sources here. Sources of information are the
their respective taxonomic description. user herself (explicitly providing contextual information),
While the time and activity similarity measures are the set of tools currently used (e.g. gathered through
independent of other dimensions, similarity measures for interaction with the task manager) and additional
location and person have a temporal aspect (e.g. a meeting information from some organisational database about the
room becomes an office as an organisation grows and new purpose of each tool used within the organisation, or
members arrive or the position of an organisational information gathered through interaction with a set of
member changes during time). This requires to take the specially designed tools (e.g. workflow management
history of persons and locations into account when systems, information systems, organisational memory, IR
measuring their similarity. systems, or even the query history of ContextAgent itself).
To improve the retrieval performance of our current
implementation we evaluate several techniques from the 4.2.3 Integration
case-based reasoning community (e.g. [DLTBP 1996],
The ContextService component is designed to be
[RS 1998], [Scha 1996]).
integrated with our Broker’s Lounge knowledge
By combining the API functions it is possible to create
management environment [JKN 2001]. This allows to
complex retrieval scenarios as e.g. document-based
combine context-based retrieval with all retrieval
retrieval of documents created in similar contexts as the
techniques offered by Broker’s Lounge (full-text, concept-
given one. To allow a greater retrieval flexibility further
based, category-based, domain-relevance-based) to reach
API functions are defined, that allow the manipulation of
a flexible and comprehensive set of retrieval capabilities.
threshold values and similarity weights.
Additionally, it is also possible to integrate
ContextService with any kind of intranet-based
4.2.2 ContextAgent
information management solution, as long as it allows the
The ContextAgent component is the main point of user identification of documents with URLs. The integration
interaction with ContextService. It serves as intermediary with these tools will be twofold:
between the user and ContextService, offering the Firstly, when documents get submitted to the
following kinds of interaction: traditional KM tool ContextService needs to know their
ContextAgent may automatically observe the user's identifier and the valid ContextModel. The process of
current context and recognise context shifts. To recognise adding a document has to be changed slightly therefore.
the user's context ContextAgent observes the set of tools Rather than adding a document to the KM tool directly it
used by the user, interacts with a set of specifically will be “added” to ContextService. ContextService in turn
designed tools like workflow management tools, forwards the add operation to the KM tool and simply
information management systems, organisational memory stores the identifier and the associated ContextModel.
systems, information retrieval systems, and observes This does not require an changes to the API of the KM
names and locations of files currently worked with. tool, just the corresponding ContextService wrapper has
Instead of relying on the automatic context recognition a to be provided.
user may also explicitly provide information on his Secondly, queries to the traditional KM tool will also
current context (or any other virtual context). be handled by the ContextService, in order to extend or
When ContextAgent recognises a context shift it reduce the number of hits given by the KM engine.
interacts with ContextService to retrieve relevant Therefore queries will have to be send to both systems
information from contexts similar to the current one. and the results will have to be combined. The only thing
Results of this operation are proposed to the user in a that has to be done to provide this, is to write a query
none-disruptive manner. The user may look at the wrapper, that forwards queries to ContextService and the
information proposed or ignore it and simply continue her existing KM tool and combine the results. This integration
daily work. On user demand ContextAgent performs the is straightforward.
retrieval operation explicitly, either using the
automatically recognised context or the explicitly user 5 Conclusion & Future Work
defined one.
We have shown the state of the art in organisational
ContextAgent makes use of different information
memory systems with a special focus on the notion of
sources to build the complete model of the user's context.
context. Based on our previous experience on context-
By using location aware components (e.g. the
based information access in the domain of information
ContextToolkit, [DA 1999]) and time observation precise
brokering we presented our requirements towards context-
data about the user's temporal and geographical context is
based organisational memories. Our approach is based on
gathered. Knowledge about location types (e.g. office or
ontological context modelling, automatic context
meeting room) may be further inferred from
R. Klemke 14-9
observation and similarity measurement of different context.
context models. We have presented the Context Despite the limited implementation we have
Framework architecture, which realises the presented encouraging experiences from first system uses. In the
ideas. near future we mainly plan to extend the current version in
By offering a completely new range of information two directions: firstly, we want to improve the
retrieval & information filtering methods that take the ContextService performance and context model
working situation of employees into account complexity. Secondly, we want to extend ContextAgent
ContextService aims to significantly improve the access of with further automatic observation functionality which
individuals to organisational memory systems and through will then also offer the possibility of active context-based
extending information with context-based meta- information provision by ContextAgent.
information it improves the way organisational
information is organised. 6 Acknowledgements
The aim of the presented approach is to provide help to
Special thanks go to Dawit Yimam and Achim Nick for
workers by providing needed information at the right time
helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I
and at the right place. It is not our aim to control or
would also like to thank the research group at GMD.FIT
supervise workers within an organisation. As this
for fruitful discussions and insights. Parts of this work
approach depends on the motivation of people to
have been funded by the EU project COBRA.
participate in knowledge sharing processes, it is important
that users trust in the system. Therefore means of security
have to be offered to users. It has to be assured that
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