Architectural approach for handling semi-structured data in a user-centred working environment

Purpose – Today the amount of all kinds of digital data (e.g. documents and e‐mails), existing on every user's computer, is continuously growing. Users are faced with huge difficulties when it comes to handling the existing data pool and finding specific information, respectively. This paper aims to discover new ways of searching and finding semi‐structured data by integrating semantic metadata.Design/methodology/approach – The proposed architecture allows cross‐border searches spanning various applications and operating system activities (e.g. file access and network traffic) and improves the human working process by offering context‐specific, automatically generated links that are created using ontologies.Findings – The proposed semantic enrichment of automated gathered data is a useful approach to reflect the human way of thinking, which is accomplished by remembering relations rather than keywords or tags. The proposed architecture supports the goals of supporting the human working process by managing...