Supporting Digital Collaborative Work through Semantic Technology

Taking advantage of the fact that knowledge exchanged within digital working environments can be made persistent, a lot of research has strived to make sense of the ongoing communications in order to support the participants with their shared management. Semantic technology has been applied for the purpose as it ensures a shared understanding of the underlying collaboration, between both humans and machines. In this paper we demonstrate how, coupled with appropriate information extraction techniques, robust knowledge models and intuitive user interfaces; semantic technology can provide support for digital collaborative work. As a virtual working environment, e-mail was a natural contender for testing our hypothesis. Taking a workflow management-based approach, we demonstrate how semantics can indeed support email-based collaboration via Semanta – a tool extending popular email clients enabling semantic email. In particular we present a novel workflow-based email visualisation, the tool’s summative evaluation, and discuss the odds of semantic applications like Semanta evolving beyond research prototypes.

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