Using Concept Maps to Improve Proactive Information Delivery in TaskNavigator

During the last decade, a plenty of approaches for intelligent user assistance in knowledge intensive working environments were developed. These solutions vary from a lightweight proactive information delivery (PID) based on a non-intrusive user observation to workflow-based assistance that requires formal modeling of processes, organizations, knowledge domains and task specific information needs. Whereas lightweight solutions have low precision and sometimes yet increase the users information overflow, approaches based on sophisticated modeling have severe problems with bootstrapping and maintenance. The work presented in the current paper aims to find an optimal integrated solution for user assistance in agile knowledge working environments that exploits a lightweight incremental modeling of task relevant knowledge and process know-how using concept maps and concept-based task tagging to improve the quality of PID results. The feasibility of the described approach was proved during the joint research project TaskNavigator conducted by Ricoh Co. Ltd and DFKI GmbH.