Smart task support through proactive access to organizational memory

Steffen Staab, Hans-Peter Schnurr

Abstract: We describe an approach towards integrating the semantics of semi-structured documents with task-support for (weakly structured) business processes and proactive inferencing capabilities of a desk support agent. The mechanism of our Proactive Inferencing Agent is motivated by the requirements posed in (weakly structured) business processes performed by a typical knowledge worker and by experiences we have made from a first trial with a Reactive Agent Support scheme. Our reactive scheme is an innovative approach for smart task support that links knowledge from an organizational memory to business tasks. The scheme is extended to include proactive inferencing capabilities in order to improve user-friendliness and to facilitate modeling of actual agent support. In particular, the improved scheme copes with varying precision of knowledge found in the organizational memory and it reasons proactively about what might be interesting to you and what might be due in your next step.