Managing Divergent Information: Enhancing Document Expressiveness

In distributed environments, especially those where asynchronous work is the main rule, organizations need to protect their information’s integrity and persistence from the manipulation of shared information resources performed by multiple users. To deal with this scenario the divergent information management aims to support and solve (whenever possible) concurrent manipulation relative to shared information artifacts. Though several approaches can deal with this situation, none of them aims directly at knowledge management or organizational memory creation. In this paper we capitalize on earlier divergent information management approaches, presenting a divergent information model, based on information structuring rather than locking mechanisms over shared resources, as a means for reinforcing the connection between distributed collaboration, decision-making and knowledge management, by enhancing document expressiveness (its persistence and linking). We then use this model as a basis for a computer-supported system to handle divergent information and present detected problems and guidelines for future research.