Self-organizing personal and institutional information management: Challenges, technologies and lessons learned

A common trend that can be currently observed in information management is a movement towards less central control and more flexibility and self-organization. This is true on the level of the infrastructure technologies as well as in information management and services, where personalized and community-based solutions such as Flickr or collaborative spam filtering have lately been very successful. Part of based solutions such as Flickr or collaborative spam filtering have lately been very successful. Part of this trend is due to the maturing of the information technology and of the user community. As a result the user community frequently wishes to play a more active but easy role in handling the functionalities offered.