1st Intelligent Office Appliances (IOA 2005): Knowledge Appliances in the Office of the Future

IT technology for ubiquitous work has reached a degree of maturity and usability that can turn every environment into a place for office work. However, this technology needs to be tightly integrated into the knowledge infrastructure and with other appliances to support knowledge work effectively, efficiently and nonintrusively. Experiences with focused aspects of future office work are already available, e.g., from applied and emerging technologies (Tablet PC, PDA, Electronic Paper, etc.). However, an integrative approach to future office work is still missing. The goal of the first workshop on Intelligent Office Appliances (IOA) was to present aspects of this integrative approach by discussing how knowledge work in the office of the future can be effectively supported by intelligent appliances. For this issue we selected two papers that address the usage and engineering aspects of intelligent office appliances: – How to make use of knowledge captured in a paper-based form is covered in Maus et al.[1]: Scanned and OCR-processed documents are integrated in a user’s personal knowledge space. –The technology for efficient implementation of intelligent office appliances is presented in Keuler et al. [2] by combining workflow specifications and software product lines. Further submissions to IOA can be found in [3].