Self-organising Knowledge-intensive Workspaces

Knowledge is pervasive in the information age. Knowledge-intensive environment represents an essential dimension in modern pervasive systems, where rich information contexts and knowledge-oriented human-computer interaction are often fundamental elements in the design of pervasive applications. However, the (too) many possible ways of human-computer interaction in pervasive systems, along with the huge, unordered amount of relevant information available could make the design of knowledge-intensive workspaces a nightmare. A computer-based working environment for researchers, journalists, writers, lawyers, physicians, politicians, administrators — all professionals dealing with critical amounts of information resources that need to be suitably reviewed, organised and used within complex, ever-changing contexts — requires on the one hand that all the relevant information sources are made available to the user in a complete yet usable format, on the other hand that the working environment autonomously evolves and adapts to the individual uses and work habits, as well as to the diverse goals and contexts defined by the everyday activity. Both requirements could be addressed by facing the following key issues: the suitable definition and representation of all the relevant information; the self-organisation — including creation, propagation and dissipation — of knowledge; and the self-organisation of the working environment. While relevant information could be handled by adopting many well-known techniques in the area of knowledge representation and extraction, the main point here is the explicit representation, memorisation and exploitation of user actions in the workspace: user actions should leave traces on the working environment which — like in stigmergic coordination, or, more generally, as in the case of cognitive stigmergy — are to be used for the self-organisation of both the relevant knowledge and the workspace. Furthermore, suitably-represented information chunks could autonomously combine to create new knowledge memes that could propagate towards the user — using for instance nature-inspired mechanisms like chemical or field-based ones —, thus providing users with a self-organising knowledge-intensive environment. Self-organisation of knowledge would involve both the individual workspace — where it should be mainly used for the self-organisation of the working environment — and the information infrastructure, and would in principle affect all the available dimensions: individual, intra-organisation and inter-organisation, up to the global scale of the Web as a world-wide knowledge source. Among the main challenges to be faced to this end, one could mention: - understanding the best techniques for representation and exploitation of user actions in the working environment; - devising the most effective mechanisms for knowledge self-organisation -- including knowledge creation, propagation and dissipation -- to be used both at the individual (in the workspace) and the global (in the information infrastructure) levels; - defining the most effective architectures for the individual workspaces and the information infrastructure, which could enable and promote effective self-organisation within any sort of pervasive scenario.