Towards an event-driven workplace for knowledge integration

A contemporary office or knowledge worker has to deal with an ever increasing number of information channels and associated flows of events (i.e., software applications using varying terminologies and access procedures). The events from different sources in varying terminology need suitable interpretation in the local context for (a) determining basic relevance, (b) understanding context-specific semantics, and (c) making and maintaining semantic connections between information demands from different sources. Without (tool) support the office-worker has to use her brain for this overhead activity instead of focusing on the actual work. This work introduces concepts on how to standardize "business events" to allow unified treatment of information flow regardless of the specific information channel they come from. These concepts of unified meta-data extraction, meta-data annotation, and unified user-to-storage interface (i.e., a nonintrusive personal assistant) relieve the user from unnecessary interpretation work load. Further they allow tool support to build up new knowledge based on aggregated information from "relevant semantic connections" between information units coming from any channels.