Agentized, Contextualized Filters for Information Management

When people read or write documents, they spontaneously generate new information needs: for example, to understand the text they are reading; to find additional information related to the points they are making in their drafts. Simultaneously, each Information Object (IO) (i.e., word, entity, term, concept, phrase, proposition, sentence, paragraph, section, document, collection, etc.) someone reads or writes also creates context for the other IOs in the same discourse. We present a conceptual model of Agentized, Contextualized Filters (ACFs)–agents that identify an appropriate context for an information object and then actively fetch and filter relevant information concerning the information object in other information sources the user has access to. We illustrate the use of ACFs in a prototype knowledge management system called ViviDocs.